Wikidata:WikiProject University degrees/Reports/Mauritius
Universities of Mauritius for WIKIDATA
editOur selectioin of the country
editAt the first discussions within the group we soon realized that we had specific requirements for a potential country that we wanted to deal with in this project.
It was important to us that it had a moderate size. So that it was possible we could definitely make it in time. But also that in case of doubt we could control our queries again by hand. Since the whole team did not have any experience with SPARQL or WIKIDATA, this was one of the important points in our selection. Further, it should be a country with a language that everyone in the team understands. So that it had been possible for all group members to search for information.
After the first spin on the digital globe Lichtenstein, Ghana, Burundi and Mauritius were our top picks. We evaluated those countries according to the information on the Anabin page. How many entries there were for each.
So we finally decided on Mauritius. And with this summer in Berlin it felt like we have done our further project on the island of Mauritius itself.
Queries
editAfter an initial overview of the data on anabindata we tested the sample queries from WIKIDATA. It was great and impressive to see how fast the examples of great graphics and maps can be created. That definitely inspired our imagination how many great queries we could do for Mauritius and the project.
Our highly motivated goal was to create the following questions:
• Which university offers a specific degree in a specific major? • What degrees does a university offer? • What degree-granting universities does a city have? • What currently existing universities are located in a specific city? • What degree-granting universities does a country have in which city? • Which universities of the country are recognised as higher education institutions (accredited, attested)? • Which country offers a specific degree in a specific major in which city? • How many universities do award a specific degree or a specific major in a country?
With this motivation we started to create first queries and our motivation got first damper.
We realized that to work with the wikidata query service was very time consuming because of many
Query timeout limit reached
errors and long loading times. Additionally it was quite complicated to differentiate between all the shortcuts wd, wdt, p, ps, bd etc. what is the difference and when to use which. Based on this difficulties we mainly on the queries we thought might be useful and we are able to create with information we have and can add. There was the question to show the universities on the island.
With the geolocation we added it looks like this
#Locations of universities in Mauritius
#defaultView:Map
SELECT ?universityLabel ?universityDescription ?website ?coord WHERE {
?university (wdt:P31/wdt:P279*) wd:Q3918.
?university wdt:P17 wd:Q1027.
?university wdt:P625 ?coord.
OPTIONAL { ?university wdt:P856 ?website. }
SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en,de". }
}
Our question:
Which universities of the country are recognised as higher education institutions (accredited, attested)? was not possible to create because there is not property in WIKIDATA for the accreditation of universities.
The queries
Which city offers a specific degree in a specific major in which city?
does work even if there are some unclear things.
We are not sure what the difference is between if a “university is an instance of a subclass of a higher education institution” ( ?university wdt:P31/wdt:P279* wd:Q38723 ) and if a “university is a university” ( ?university wdt:P31 wd:Q3918 ). It seems to be the same but there are different results for each query. By playing around with the queries we noticed that very few universities have the property “grant”. For germany we get 658 universities but just less than ten have it.
Finally we decided to use the first version with higher education institution.
SELECT DISTINCT ?university ?universityLabel ?degreeLabel ?majorLabel ?cityLabel WHERE {
SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language
"[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en". }
?university wdt:P31/wdt:P279* wd:Q38723;
wdt:P17 wd:Q1027;# in country mauritius
wdt:P131 ?city;
p:P5460 ?statement .
?statement ps:P5460 ?degree .
?statement pq:P812 ?major .
FILTER(?degree = wd:Q1765120) #bachelor of arts degree
FILTER(?major = wd:Q16653334) #Law and management
FILTER(?city = wd:Q282908 ) #Moka
}
ORDER BY ?universityLabel ?degreeLabel ?majorLabel
It’s practical an enhancement of the already existing queries in the example section. So first we search for all universities in the country X i.e.Mauritius. We want to know in which city the university is based and which degree and major is granted. At last we gave the opportunity to filter for special towns, degrees and majors. This way it is possible to find a specific degree with a specific major in a city within a country. The third question is about some statistics. (How many universities do award a specific degree or a specific major in a country?) It should show for a specific country a little overview about how many degrees or majors of the same kind do exist.
After a few difficulties we finally managed to create the query.
SELECT ?degreeLabel (COUNT(DISTINCT ?item) AS ?count) WHERE {
{ ?item wdt:P31 wd:Q3918. }
SERVICE wikibase:label {bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en".}
OPTIONAL { ?item wdt:P17 ?country;
p:P5460 ?statement .
?statement ps:P5460 ?degree .
?statement pq:P812 ?major .}
FILTER(?country = wd:Q1027 ) #Mauritius
}
GROUP BY ?degreeLabel ORDER BY DESC(?count)
The same works for the major to get a little more detailed overview just bei changing the ?degreeLabel with ?majorLabel . We first say that we want to count the item and the item has to be a university within a country and with properties degree and major. After that we group the outcome by degree or majorLabel which gives us a nice list how many universities provide a special degree or major in a special country.
This is the result for mauritius and degrees.
We continued to create further Queries although It was more diffcult than expected. We repeatedly came to the point that elementary information was not recorded in WIKIDATA.
Therefore, shared the work in the group. 2-thirds added to the missing information from the universities and study programs to WIKIDATA.
Adding new items
editIn addition to our initial research, we looked for the Universitius of Mauritius via Anabin and Google to see which Universities already have an entry and which do not. The following list represents current academic institutions in Mauritius, some are fully respected others are not (based on Anabin’s rating status):
• Mahatma Gandhi Institute - H- (not respected) • Open University of Mauritius (formerly Mauritius College of the Air) - H+ (respected) • Rushmore Business School Ltd - H- • Université des Mascareignes - H+ • University of Mauritius - H+ • University of Technology, Mauritius - H+
We created Rushmore BS Ltd, Université des Mascareignes and the Mauritius College of the Air and linked the Open University with the College of the Air via the properties replaces / replaced by. We were unsure of what property is best suited to display that the College of the Air was reconfigured to the Open University. We chose replaces / replaced by as it seems to be what we want to model. And we had long talks about the fact that we were not sure if the Open University of Mauritius have been accredited. We checked the sites and searched the internet for further information. But we have not found an independent source of information that we could clarify that the Open University is internationally accepted. It would have been usefull if anabin would provide the information when they updated their informations last and wikidata would have and source of validation as well.
But we also started a new discussion on this topic, where we compare the properties replaces and follows (replaced by / followed by) to get some more insight from experienced Wikidata user.
Next up we mapped the list of degrees from Anabin by the universities offering the degree. The Results are displayed here:
• Open University: LLB ( Bachelor of Law) Law and Management (BA) Management (BSc) Finance and Law (BSc) Diploma Social Work
• University of Mauritius: Food Science and Technology (BSc) Civil Engineering (BEng) Electrical and Electronic Engineering (BEng) Mechanical Engineering (BEng) Mechatronics (BEng) Information Systems (BSc) Accounting with Finance (BSc) Finance (BSc) Finance with Law (BSc) Management (BSc) Tourism, Hospitality and Events Management (BSc) LLB Law and Management (BA) Bachelor of Medicine (MD) Diploma Information Technology
• University of Technology: Tourism Management and Marketing (MSc) Financial Engineering (MSc) Software Engineering (MSc) Accounting with Finance (BSc) Management (BSc) Civil Engineering (BEng) Communication Engineering (BEng) Electronic Engineering (BEng) Diploma in Procurement and Supply Management
• Université des Mascareignes: Diploma Human Resource Management Civil Engineering (BEng)
• Rushmore Business School Ltd.: Diploma Human Resource Management Diploma Information Technology LLB
• Mahatma Gandhi Institute: -
Surprisingly many courses are not accepted by Anabin or their data is outdated.
So the Mahatma Gandhi Institute is listed as universities/ institutes in Anabin but none of its courses is actually accepted. For the sake of confirmation we will deal with the listed courses above as they are accepted as some form of academic degree.
Before we go in Detail about the all the different degrees and how we added them do WIKIDATA. There is one point we want mention. To us it seemed obvious that WIKIDATA has been enriched with other sources. During our step of adding all kind of degrees, no matter how different it was, there already has been an entry for it. Unfortunately it was from a journal and not useful in our context and we had to create the item again.
We struggled with the difference between ‘electrical and electronic engineering’ and ‘electrical engineering’, were the second one already exists in WIKIDATA and the former was created by us. We ran into a lot of those cases as it seems the universities often offer courses about the same topic run under (slightly) different names. In the case of electric and electronic engineering we decided to give electrical engineering an alias to make clear the majors are not actually different but are just named differently. After that we wanted to delete the entry created by us but found no way. We left the entry with a new discussion about the topic and suggested that the entry could be deleted.
The next thing we noticed was the majors with minors actually written in their name. Finance with Law or Accounting with Finance serve as good examples. The question with these majors is if they actually should be treated as new majors with the solution being that minors can not be modelled on the university level (as in Uni X grants major z with minor y) and can only be modelled on a person.
We stumbled across the difference between ‘academic major’ and ‘academic discipline’ as one is actually a subclass of the other. We decided to go by the major being the actual major you graduate in and the discipline being the scientific/ academic field the major is belonging to. So you can major in algebra with the discipline being mathematics.
Recap
editAltogether we learned how difficult it is to model even such a small fracture of the world. We have thought that we deal with clear rules and regulations. But even in this context it is very complex. With our demand to do right it was very hard to add something. Although it was more difficult we never lost the interest and was very interesting to see the different approaches and ideas of doing it correctly. We think WIKIDATA is on a good way and gives a good opportunity to model all different aspects of our the world and knowledge. Nevertheless we still have the concern that very different approaches and not completed information could create problems which might not be easy to solve in future. If there is any solutions for it in the future. But the possibilities, the many thoughtful tool and a broad community point in the direction of a much brighter future of the project. It was nice to see that different people from the community uses besides others our entry electrical and electrical engineering (Q64806930) in the meantime. That information gave the impressions that it was for a good cause.