Wikidata:WikiProject University degrees/Reports/Finland

Choosing a country and exploring the data

We decided to analyze the universities and degrees offered in Finland. We chose Finland because it is a potential country for a foreign exchange year for us master students. This way we get to know the various universities and degrees Finland offers which helps us to make a decision.

Approach

We approached the task by exploring the Wikidata pages of Finnish universities and also of universities that last year’s students of the Semantic Modelling module have been working on and created degrees in. This helped us to get a better understanding on the structure and variety of the information.

Anabin was one of the sites introduced to us in class, it is provided by the culture minister conference, so we decided to use it as our starting point. With Anabin one can search for universities and degrees with the corresponding majors that are granted at a university for countries around the globe. Anabin also offers information about foreign education institutions and degrees and rates them to make them comparable to German degrees. For Finland Anabin contained at that point in time 131 universities, 10 degree-types and 87 degrees. This seemed to be the type of data we were looking for, therefore we decided to use this as our data source. Unfortunately, there is no unified language on Anabin, data for Finland was available either in German or Finnish. So, our idea was to extract data from Anabin, translate it if necessary and add it to Wikidata using QuickStatements.

Parsing Anabin

As retrieving the data manually seemed to be quite a big effort, we decided to automate the task. Therefore, we went through the source code of the Anabin website and observed how the website itself retrieves the data. By doing so we found the JSON endpoint and used that to write a C# console application that retrieves the data, parses the information and saves relevant information in csv format. The code of the C# application is available as a Github Gist: https://gist.github.com/maltegoetz/58045cf6562d56ff7c2309d62aa316dc

Processing Anabin data

With the csv data in place we started to translate data into English to unify the language mixture. While doing so we noticed that there were a lot of duplicate entries for universities, so we removed the duplicates first. We also figured out that some universities got renamed or merged. A lot of the degrees do not seem to be offered anymore or we could not find any data at all on it, so it might be faulty. Some degrees that were translated to German by Anabin or the university had translations that looked wrong to us and were not helpful at all. So, it seemed that the data was outdated by quite a few years and extremely incomplete. When we started, we thought the data would be quite complete, just by judging some numbers, but Anabin actually just contains a fraction of what Finnish universities offer. At this point in time it still seemed to be of less effort to work through the university websites instead of checking up on every item in the Anabin dataset. Therefore, our learning here was to check the data at an earlier stage.

Realization

We went on by researching how many universities Finland has. According to Finnish national agency for education there are 13 universities and 23 universities of applied sciences. Compared to the 131 universities/institutions listed on Anabin, there seems to be a huge gap. As we were quite limited in time, we made the decision to go on with the two best ranked universities according to the QS Ranking, which ranks universities worldwide. University of Helsinki and Aalto University are the ranked ones and both located in Helsinki or the greater metropolitan area.

We then went on researching the degrees and majors offered by these universities on their websites and added the corresponding statements for the university in Wikidata. By doing so we found a lot of new degrees like the following, that we added to Wikidata:

• Bachelor of Agriculture and Forestry (Q64686908)/Master of Agriculture and Forestry (Q64689202)
• Candidate of veterinary medicine (Q64689288)/Licentiate of Veterinary Medicine (Q64689298)
• Licentiate of Medicine (Q64869217)
• Licentiate in Dentistry (Q64869221)
• Mas­ter of In­ter­na­tional and Com­par­at­ive Law (Q64808789)

The Finnish higher education system is quite close to the German one, so it follows the Bologna process. For the disciplines like medicine, dentistry and veterinary medicine it has special degrees in place that could be compared to the German state examination. The Bachelor/Master of Agriculture and Forestry and the Master of International and Comparative Law seemed totally new to us and we could not find further explanations why these are not a Bachelor/Master of Science or Law for instance.

Queries

To query the degrees and corresponding majors we added to the universities in Wikidata, we created a SPARQL query:

SELECT ?universityLabel ?degreeLabel ?majorLabel 
WHERE {
    SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". }
    ?university wdt:P17 wd:Q33 ; #country is Finland
      wdt:P31 wd:Q875538 ; #instance of public university
      p:P5460 ?grants .
    ?grants ps:P5460 ?degree . #grants degree
    OPTIONAL { ?grants pq:P812 ?major .} #academic major
}
ORDER BY ?degreeLabel ?universityLabel

Try it!

We noticed that the degrees we added started to be used by other users, so we wrote short query to get all items listed that are using them:

SELECT DISTINCT ?item ?itemLabel WHERE {
  VALUES ?addedDegrees { wd:Q64869217 wd:Q64689288 wd:Q64869221 wd:Q64689298 wd:Q64689202 wd:Q64686908 wd:Q64808789 } #degrees added by us
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en". }
  ?item wdt:P512 ?addedDegrees . # has one of the degrees
}
LIMIT 100

Try it!

Good and Challenging

This section is discussing the good but also challenging experiences we had during the realization of this project.

Good

By choosing Finland, we encountered a few positive experiences. The universities had good and clearly structured websites and it was easy to find a list of all study programs. The lists could be filtered by certain categories like degree level, faculty or language. Also, a lot of study programs were in English so that it was easy for us to understand what is actually being taught without using translations that often seem to be ambiguous.

Challenging

Against our expectations of having a clear structure in study programs and strong patterns that are being followed we faced some challenging experiences within the project. Besides English some study programs are being taught in Finnish and Swedish. Although we used a decent translator the translations were sometimes really hard to understand and unclear. Also, we used a Wikidata group account (MassiveQuokka) for this project. During class we often worked at one university entry in parallel. This setup caused conflicts because we overwrote each other’s entries unknowingly. When we realized this, we had to go through the history to reenter entries that got lost.

History and Language

In 2005 Finland made some changes to their degree system. The lower university degree type candidate was renamed to the bachelor’s degree. However, the so called filosofian kandidaatti (philosophian cadidate) was a higher degree type comparable to a master’s degree. This caused a lot of trouble while translating a study program that has a “filosofian kandidaatti” as a degree type because there are multiple translations for it, by name Master of Arts Bachelor of Philosophy and Master of Science. So, we had to do some research about the program to find out the right translation of that degree type in that particular case.

Impossible to model

While going through the different degrees and programs that are provided in the two universities, we sometimes arrived at points where we couldn’t find any more solution on how to model the data. In particular we struggled with the following two problems:

Programs that don’t have a clearly defined degree

Especially at the university of Helsinki we found some programs that had multiple possible degrees. The reason for that is that in this program you choose a study track while doing your master and the chosen study track defines the degree you will receive later:

You can apply for one of the two study tracks in the ECGS Master’s programme: the Environmental Change study line or the Global Sustainability study line.

This made it impossible for us to choose one of the two degrees as it is impossible for us to tell which of the two degrees someone could receive.

Joint Degrees

The other problem we faced were joint degrees. A joint degree is a degree where a student is studying at two universities in a program and receives two degrees through that. While going through the programs of Aalto university, we realised that there are about ten programs that are described as a double degree. The first program we found is described on the program website as following:

Through studies in the AMIS programme, students will become experts in the field of raw materials, particularly in sustainable functional materials. Alongside, they will get a holistic view on value and process chain.

• During the first year of studies (either at Aalto University, TU Darmstadt in Germany or Grenoble Institute of Technology, France), students build a body of skills and knowledge that puts them on fast track to becoming specialists in materials science and entrepreneurship. They will receive state-of-the art knowledge in functional and applied materials science (e.g. their elaboration, phase transformation, structure, microstructure and properties) together will fundamental principles and concepts of businesses and entrepreneurship strategy. The year is completed by a summer camp, jointly with all the other AMIS students, and internship in the field.
• The second year of studies is completed either at Aalto University, TU Darmstadt in Germany, Grenoble Institute of Technology or University of Bordeaux in France or University of Liège, Belgium. During the second year of studies, the students will acquire an in-depth understanding of some specialist topics in nanophysics, nanomaterials and functional materials. The specialization topic offered at Aalto University is Nanomaterials and Interfaces: Advanced Characterization and Modeling.

The special thing about this program is that you choose in the first year from three universities and in the second year you choose from five universities. The degrees you will later receive depend on the universities and programs that you choose. However, our problem was that there is no way for us to tell what universities the students would choose from the multiple options. Also, on the program website there is nowhere told what kind of degree you will get after finishing your year in Aalto. What made the problem worse is that there are other joint degrees like the following one offered:

During the two-year EMC master's programme, students study together in three different universities:

• 30 ECTS at Aalto University in Finland – studies are jointly organised by the School of Engineering and the School of Chemical Engineering
• 30 ECTS at RWTH Aachen in Germany
• 30 ECTS at TU Delft in the Netherlands
• 30 ECTS MSc thesis (co-supervised by all three partner universities). Master’s theses are often completed under the supervision of the student’s own university and in co-operation with industry.

In this joint degree you study at three different universities and write your master thesis co-supervised at all three partner universities. We wanted to model both of the examples with the same item, so we decided to create an item called “joint degree”. Our plan was to add the academic degree and the participating universities for the degree. Here we also encountered some problems. We actually would have wanted to model the item with three layers:

A possible modelling of joint degrees in Wikidata

Figure 1: A possible modelling of joint degrees

By modelling it this way, it would always be possible to tell which participating university belongs to which academic major. However, this is currently not possible in Wikidata and there are only two levels allowed. As we are at the moment not able to model the universities to their associated degrees, we decided to leave them out and only put in the academic degrees.

Learning Experience

We learned a lot of this during the project. One very important point for us was to always check the data in the beginning. This would have saved us a lot of time while working with Anabin, as we probably just could have skipped this part that we spent some weeks on. We also learned that universities and academic degrees are far more complex than we imagined before. Initially we imagined that we maybe would be able to model all universities of Finland but realized quickly that this won’t be possible. This also is related to our next point: The language barrier made it hard for us to automatically import data. We had to translate many degrees from Finish or Swedish to English before we could put them in. This could sometimes be exhausting and a little bit frustrating, especially because of the specialties of the Finish language and history. Through the project we learned the use of Wikidata a lot better which will for sure help when we will use it for the next time.

Conclusion and Outlook

We realized during the project that (at the moment) not everything can be modelled. Also, the language barrier made it harder for us to enter everything. We also asked ourselves, how long the data there would be up to date. In our opinion it will be hard to always keep the data at the newest level. An automated import would be nice; however, this doesn’t seem possible to us looking at all the problems that we described. Instead, university staff would need to keep it up-to-date after changes have been made to the degrees.