Wikidata:WikiProject University degrees/Reports/New Zealand

Getting Started

First, we did some exercises in SPARQL to get used to the syntax. Then we read through the reports from past groups of the Semantic Modeling course in the summer semester 2018. This helped us a lot to see what is important. Now we watched some tutorial videos and examples to get used to Quick Statements. Afterward, we looked at some properties related to universities and degrees.

Information about University Degrees in New Zealand

Now we used Anabin to get a rough idea about the universities and study programs in New Zealand. We excluded things that are not universities like polytechnic (Fachhochschule), private training and Wānanga (publicly-owned institution that provides education in a Māori cultural context). Afterward, eight universities were left. To get some more informations we looked at the university websites:

1. https://www.victoria.ac.nz/
2. https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en.html
3. https://www.aut.ac.nz/
4. http://www.lincoln.ac.nz/
5. https://www.massey.ac.nz/
6. https://www.canterbury.ac.nz/
7. https://www.otago.ac.nz/
8. https://www.waikato.ac.nz/

Checking what is already on Wikidata

Universities on New Zealand

After looking through the university sites we created a query to see if they are all in WikiData

The following query uses these:

• Items: university (Q3918)   , New Zealand (Q664)   

• Properties: instance of (P31)   , located in the administrative territorial entity (P131)   , country (P17)   

  SELECT DISTINCT ?university ?universityLabel ?city ?cityLabel
  WHERE {
    ?university wdt:P31 wd:Q3918 ;
            wdt:P131 ?city .
    ?city wdt:P17 wd:Q664 .
      SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". }
  }
  

Try it!

Cleanup

Next, we needed to make some changes on institutes that are no universities because they were also shown in that list.

• Changed instance of Q7895094 to faculty
• Changes instance of Q19875507 to private university
• Changed instance of Q7996527 to higher education institute
• Changed instance of Q7960000 to higher educational institute
• Changed instance of Q7987965 to higher educational institute
• Changed instance of Q2495129 to higher educational institute
• Changed instance of Q7896037 to faculty

After that we got this list, and found out that all universities that are listed in Anabain are already in WikiData:

No.	university	city
Q1150437	Victoria University of Wellington	Wellington
Q492467	University of Auckland	Auckland
Q758659	Auckland University of Technology	Auckland
Q1048626	Lincoln University	Lincoln
Q1134606	Massey University	Palmerston North
Q432475	University of Canterbury	Christchurch
Q1201513	University of Otago	Dunedin
Q606140	University of Waikato	Hamilton

Gathering general information about New Zealand's Universities

Because we didn't need to create new universities we directly started with looking into adding information about the degrees that are granted. To get started we chose the biggest university of New Zealand: University of Auckland (Q492467). They have more than 40.000 students and 177 study programs. For reasons of time, we realized later, that we could only complete work at this university.

Bachelor / Master Degrees

Degrees in humanities are mostly Bachelor / Master of Arts. In sciences mostly Bachelor / Master of Science. This is how it works in Germany, but in New Zealand we have a lot of variations like:

• Bachelor / Master of Commerce
• Bachelor / Master of Applied Science
• Bachelor / Master of Business Administration
• Bachelor / Master of Dance Studies

Academic Majors granted by the Auckland University

We found out that there are 730 majors in New Zealand.

After querying all majors and academic disciplines in WikiData, we saw that we had to create a lot of them.

The following query uses these:

• Items: academic discipline (Q11862829)   , academic major (Q4671286)   

• Properties: instance of (P31)   

  SELECT ?discipline ?disciplineLabel WHERE {
    ?discipline wdt:P31 wd:Q11862829;
            	wdt:P31 wd:Q4671286.
    SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". }
  }
  

Try it!

Creating Degrees

While working on this project there were some things that were rather easy to model, so we will take a short look at them first. After that we will look at some of the more difficult things. We started with creating the granted Bachelor and Master degrees. The University of Auckland grants a total of 18 different Bachelor degrees, we had to create 6 of them. They also grant 55 Master degree, 35 of them we had to create.

Creating Majors

Like we showed earlier there are a lot of academic majors so we hat to created roughly 50 of them.

Graduate Diploma

A graduate diploma (Q24897872) is an undergraduate diploma that gives you the possibility to extend knowledge in a major field. At the University of Auckland you can get a graduate diploma in these fields:

• architecture
• commerce
• law
• music
• science
• art

Postgraduate Diploma

A postgraduate diploma (Q4118152) is a postgraduate qualification awarded after a university degree. It voids the original degree awarded to the recipient and can be contrasted with a graduate diploma. At the University of Auckland you can get it in these academic majors:

• applied psychology
• architecture
• art
• biomedical sciences
• Bioscience
• business
• clinical education
• Clinical pharmacy
• counseling
• dance studies
• education
• educational leadership
• engineering
• fine art
• Health Psychology
• health science
• ...

Doctorate

Doctorate are like in Germany, so not really interessint. At the University of Auckland you can get a doctorate in these fields:

• clinical psychology
• education
• fine art
• medicine
• music
• philosophy
• Musical Arts

Postgraduate Certificate

A postgraduate diploma (Q4118152) is designed to widen and deepen knowledge and skills in major and preparation to other postgraduate study options or to provide professional development option. It is completed in six months full time or up to two years part-time. They were easy to model.

At the Univerity of Auckland you can get it in these academic majors:

• clinical education
• clinical pharmacy
• education
• engineering
• geothermal energy
• health science
• higher education
• information technology
• law
• social and community leadership
• translation

After these easy things, we now get to some more difficult things.

Modelling Double Degrees

With a double degree, you complete two degrees at the same time in 4 to 5 years. The big problem is that there are many different combinations to choose from. In this example, you can see all combinations with the Bachelor of Commerce at the University of Auckland.

Bachelor of Advanced Science (Honours)	Licentiate in Canon Law
Bachelor of Arts	Bachelor of Commerce
Bachelor of Commerce	Bachelor of Commerce
Bachelor of Commerce	Bachelor of Engineering (Honours)
Bachelor of Commerce	Bachelor of Global Studies
Bachelor of Commerce	Bachelor of Health Sciences
Bachelor of Commerce	Bachelor of Music
Bachelor of Commerce	Bachelor of Science
Bachelor of Commerce	Bachelor of Laws
Bachelor of Commerce	Bachelor of Laws (Honours)

At first, we looked around to find some instanced and found the instance double degree (Q716855) and this Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (Q13948235). The second one is and degree that is modeled with two has part(s) (P527). Because this wasn't the ideal solution we began thinking about possible ways to model it a more elegant way.

Option 1	Option 2	Option 3

We modeled three ways that can be seen in the pictures. In the options one and two, you would need to specify if the degree is a Bachelor or Master and add two academic majors that resemble the majors of the single degree. The third is following the hasPart idea that we found in Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (Q13948235). Sadly Option 1 and 2 are not possible yet, because there are only three hierarchy levels. And you cant put a qualifier on a qualifier. Also a property like a degree type would be necessary, that also doesn't exist yet. And to put all different combinations inside WikiData with Option3, you would need to create a ton of statements. But it would be possible. None of these options provide a nice way to map all the possible combinations. So this needs to be discussed further.

Right now decided to just state that the University grants double degree (Q716855), without listing all the possible combinations.

Modelling Double Major

Double majors are different from conjoint and double degrees. You choose two majors within a program of study e.g Bachelor of Arts majoring in Psychology and English. The problem is similar to the double degrees and we had no time to further discuss this problem, so we didn't model it yet.

Modelling Bachelor Honours degree

In New Zealand, an Honours Degree is a separate level of qualifications from a normal bachelor degree. It may either be a 4-year course or a single-year course following on from a bachelor's degree and prepares students for postgraduate study. Like with the double degree we look around in WikiData to get an idea to model it and found some people with this degree. Two examples that are differently modeled are Douglas Ernest Warren (Q61866805) and John Pickering (Q47503853). With the first option, some information gets lost. So we favored the second. But there was no clear way to model it yet.

After that, we began thinking about how to model the granting of Honours degrees and modeled three possible ways.

Option1	Option2	Option3

• Option 1: All Honours degrees need to be an own instance of Honours degree
• Option 2: Modelling Honours degree like Bachelor with academic majors
• Option 3: Not possible yet and a little redundant because in NZ Honours degrees are always Bachelor degrees

Right now we decided to use Option 2 with the instance honours degree (Q10862985) to model it and quantify it with academic mayors.

At the Auckland University there are following Honours degrees granted:

• law
• art
• biomedical sciences
• commerce
• dance studies
• Education
• fine art
• health science
• Medical Science
• Music
• Nursing
• Property
• Science
• social work

Conclusion

Like stated earlier something made no trouble to put in WikiData like the Bachelor and Master degrees. So we could use QuickStatements to create many of them at once and were rather quickly done with them. Other thing made use quite some headache like the double degrees and the honours degrees. And its a little frustrating that we couldn't find a good solution for these problems. We also learned that something so supposedly easy like universities and academic degrees can be really complex. In the beginning, we thought that we would be able to model all universities in New Zealand but realized quickly that this won’t be possible. In the end, this project showed us that a lot of things are possible with semantic modeling and WikiDate but some other things not right now. Nonetheless, the things that are possible can still be quite useful.