Wikidata:WikiProject University degrees/Reports/Ireland

Phase 1: Choose a country and explore the Anabin database for this country. What universities offer which degrees?

We started by looking up the institution types of Ireland at Anabin. The database provides 122 entries. When having a closer look at each entry we noticed that Anabin returned every single institution of each university or college in Ireland. To get all universities we filtered the search for the term (provided by Anabin) “Hochschule”. That way we were able to reduce the results to only 19 entries. But that seemed still like a lot of universities for a small country like Ireland. So we started comparing the given entries with another website which listed all universities of Ireland. That brought the number down to a total of six universities. Some Anabin data results were still present multiple times, because some universities have more than just one location. The actual universities of Ireland are Dublin City University (DCU), University of Limerick (UL), University of Dublin / Trinity College (TCD), National University of Ireland (NUI), Saint Patrick's College and Technological University of Dublin (TCD). The NUI is subdivided into four universities, the University College Dublin (UCD), University College Cork (UCC), Maynooth University (NUI Maynooth) and National University of Ireland Galway (NUI Galway), all with a different location.

The degrees that are offered by these universities are:

Degrees granted by Irish universities
Baccalaureate in Canon Law	Licentiate in Canon Law
Baccalaureate in Philosophy	Licentiate in Philosophy
Baccalaureate in Theology	Licentiate in Theology
Bachelor of Architecture
Bachelor of/in …	Master of/in …
Doctor of/in …	Master of/in ... honoris causa
Doctor of/in ... honoris causa
Honorary degree of Doctor of/in …	Honorary degree of Master of/in …

Phase 2: What kind of queries could potentially be asked of this data? Include them on the queries page!

To get familiar with Wikidata queries, we created a query that returns all entries which are an instance of university and in are located Ireland. As a result it returned a list of 35 entries. But these entries consisted of different institutes, colleges and universities. So we still focused on those universities we found before in phase 1. After adding all the new information we were able to write queries which ask for all degrees which are granted at the universities of Ireland or at specific university.

The following query uses these:

• Items: university (Q3918)   , Republic of Ireland (Q27)   

• Properties: instance of (P31)   , country (P17)   

  SELECT DISTINCT ?university ?universityLabel WHERE { 
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". }
    ?university wdt:P31 wd:Q3918. #instance of university
    ?university wdt:P17 wd:Q27. #country Irleand
  }
  ORDER BY ?universityLabel
  

Try it!

Phase 3: Check if the university already exists in Wikidata. If not, create the university item. Do you have any other information that needs added?

Each university already has a Wikidata entry. The entries are very detailed and we did not find much missing information. What we did not expect was that the NUI (National University of Ireland) even contained all its subsidiaries. We did not expect the data of the universities already being so detailed. To “St. Patrick’s College” we added the alternative name (alias) “Saint Patrick’s College” because we could not find the entry with under that name but believe it is useful.

Phase 4: Check if the degrees offered already exist in Wikidata. If not, create the degrees (make SURE that they are not already there). Connect up the university to the degree.

We decided to add the degrees of the Dublin City University to Wikidata. Since the university has a lot of study programs, it awards a lot of degrees. We structured the degrees the following: A degree, i.e. Bachelor of Science, consists of an academic major and, if given, an academic minor. The academic major describes in which program the degree was received, for example “Bachelor of Science in Health and Society”. The academic minor determines that a minor subject is taught in the program of study. A degree which holds such minor subjects is i.e. the “Bachelor of Education in Gaeilge and French or German or Spanish”. The minor in this degree is defined by the “or” between the subjects (languages). A lot of the degrees that are granted at the Dublin City University did not exist in the database, so we had to create them. We created them by setting the name to the field into which the degree was given. To define, that it is a part of an academic degree, we added the statement “instance of academic discipline” to the entry. We also provided a short description to each new entry, which we created based on the information on the university website. So all entries we created have the structure which is shown in the following picture.

Example of a newly created academic discipline item (Screenshot)

Figure 1: Example of a newly created item (academic discipline)

To get a feeling for wikidata, at first we created our entries by hand. That way we got aware of what information seemed useful to us and needed in every new dataset. Especially for new items it is always the label (Len = english label), description (Den = english description) and where it is ranked within its hierarchy, i.e. P31 - Q11862829 is equal to “instance of academic discipline”. We then set up a spreadsheet and collected missing items and the needed information to add it to Wikidata. Most missing items for our project were academic disciplines. To set up the spreadsheet we also had a closer look at QuickStatements. The very first obstacle to overcome was actually being allowed to use it since we needed at least 50 edits in wikidata to be auto-granted to the service. After that it took us a few moments of trying and a lot of reading to understand how to use it. Therefore the Wiki on QuickStatements was very helpful. When we had all our information gathered we finally wanted to put it to the test and use the full potential of batch adding items. The data import proceeded without any problems but when we then started the process it returned errors. At first it told us that our description was to long and later that an item with the exact same description is already present. Would have been nice to get those error feedbacks already after the import. Shortening the descriptions did the job and batch process was finally successful.

Figure x: Spreadsheet and result in QuickStatements

Figure 2: Spreadsheet and result in QuickStatements

Degrees in Ireland are structured in levels. Low-level degrees are mostly called certificates. For this project we only concentrated on degrees like the Bachelor degree and higher. We found a figure in a 2010-report from the Irish Immigration Service which helped us to understand the structure better.

Irish 10 Level Qualifications Framework

Figure 3: The Irish 10 level qualification framework

By adding degrees to the “university grants” section we run into multiple problems, such as “how to define these degrees correctly with the given Wikidata system”. Degrees granted by the DCU can look like the following

• Bachelor of Science in Physical Education with Mathematics
  • Here it was obvious to us that the major is Physical Education and the “with” indicates an additional minor discipline to the degree.

Figure 4: Example of degree with academic major and minor

• Bachelor of Science in Education and Training
  • The given case holds an “and” between two majors. We discussed treating degrees holding an “and” generally as double degrees. But since the university and anabin database never mentioned the possibility of achieving those we were quite uncertain about that. There were also degrees like “Bachelor of Law and Policy” in which case we think the two majors are too close to each other to be a double degree.

• Bachelor of Business Studies (Hons)
  • The “Honours” (Hons) degree could in the end not be modelled since we could not agree on a certain way to represent it. As we found out in Ireland an honours degree can be achieved by having a final mark > 2.1 for your studies. Some study programs also expect an additional year of studying from the student. But overall it is the same program. By discussing that matter with other groups we also found out that the honours degree is handled quite differently from country to country. So even if we could model a new property there would still be the question on what definition it should be based on. For us it did not feel right to create an additional item just to add the “(Hons)” to the label, but we also are missing the option to add an extra property to a property which we find useful in that case.

• Certificate in Peer Support Working in Mental Health
  • Regarding the 10-Level qualifications framework certificates rank below a Bachelor degree. Due to that and the amount of available under- and postgraduate degrees we did not model these.

• Bachelor of Science (Hons) in Nursing (Intellectual Disability), Bachelor of Science (Hons) in Nursing (General), Bachelor of Science (Hons) in Nursing (Mental Health)
  • Some study programs are listed multiple times on the DCU website but also have specification at the end of its naming. Since the course description for these are all the same and it says “area related educational framework for nurses and other healthcare practitioners” we decided on only modelling the BSc in Nursing. The decision is based on what we experienced within the IMI study program. When successfully finished the student will be granted a BSc degree and web technologies, game technologies or image processing can be added as specification.

• Professional Master of Education (Primary Teaching)
  • “The Professional Master of Education (PME) is a required qualification for persons wishing to work as post-primary school teachers in the Republic of Ireland and a recognised teaching qualification within the EU.” Because of the found description the “Professional Master” is being modelled as any other masters degree

Phase 5: Add additional data as discovered and test the queries

To get an overview of the data we have added, we wrote a query which searches for all degrees (Bachelor and Master) including its major labels, which are granted by the Dublin City University.

The following query uses these:

• Items: Dublin City University (Q1202897)   

• Properties: grants (P5460)   , academic major (P812)   

  SELECT ?degreeLabel ?majorLabel WHERE {
  
    SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en". }
    wd:Q1202897 p:P5460 ?statement .
    ?statement ps:P5460 ?degree .
    ?statement pq:P812 ?major .
    }
  
  ORDER BY ?degreeLabel
  

Try it!

We extended the query to return all Bachelor degrees including its major labels which are granted by the Dublin City University.

The following query uses these:

• Items: Dublin City University (Q1202897)   , bachelor's degree (Q163727)   

• Properties: instance of (P31)   , subclass of (P279)   , grants (P5460)   , academic major (P812)   

  SELECT ?degreeLabel ?majorLabel WHERE {
  
    SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en". }
    wd:Q1202897 p:P5460 ?statement .
    ?statement ps:P5460 ?degree .
    ?statement pq:P812 ?major .
    ?degree wdt:P31*/wdt:P279* wd:Q163727 .
    }
  
  ORDER BY ?degreeLabel
  

Try it!

Phase 6: Conclusion

At the beginning of this project we tried to gather all information regarding the universities and its granted degrees from Anabin. But the available information does seem very much outdated and is not very well structured. We then compared the given information with other online sources and found out that the NUI is subdivided into four universities, which raised the number of institutions. Anabin also had duplicate entries which often where aliases to one university and we could only find those duplicates by comparing the institutes address. We decided to not only rely on Anabins given information but used it for double checking our information. We found that the use of Wikidata is complicated to model a degree dataset, since some study programs and the achievable degree holds extra information, which can not be easily added to the given structure. For those side cases like the degrees containing a “with”, “and” or an “Hons” we would have needed an extra property for the qualifier: major. That way information like a minor, a specialisation or special degree could be bound to the degree’s major. Another issue is, that someone has to keep the current information of wikidata up-to-date. When the university offers new study programs with new degrees someone has to add them to the Dublin City University -entry. Also when certain degrees are not offered anymore they were still granted in the past and should not simply be deleted but maybe marked as "not granted anymore" or something alike.