Discussions on College/University
Dean?
I wanted to created the relationship between my grad school and the dean, but there is no 'dean' type. perhaps its should be created? also, curious what thoughts are for the difference between a school within a university and college/university. shouldn't there be another type/relationship there?
Dean should be entered as an administrator -- you can set the title to "Dean" while adding the administrator's name and dates of office. Schools or colleges within a university is a good idea, and should be added in. I'm open to suggestions on how to implement it. The best way to handle it is probably to create a new type, and set up a reciprocal relationship between it and "college/university"; two issues with this are: what do we call it? and what other properties does it have (I'm assuming it will be co-typed with "institution")?
I certainly agree that the handling of organisational structures needs a principled approach.
In fact, the basic structures are in place already. The Type 'College/University' has a property 'Constituent or subsidiary Schools'. Conversely, the Type 'Institution (aka 'educational_institution') has a property ('Parent institution') denoting what it's a part of. So the appropriate data-modelling structures are there already.
The problem is the superficial (but critical) one of the naming of these two types. That this is a problem is evidenced by the fact that there are numerous topics under 'College/University' which are actually *parts* of such. See the various topics for University of Edinburgh" for example. So people evidently do not realise what they should be doing.
The answer I sugges is:
1. Restrict the Type 'College/University' to the top-level organisation.
2 Re-define the Type 'Institution' to mean *any* institution, not just educational.
3. EITHER
3a. Allow 'Institution' to apply to the top-level organisation or any part inside it, with a recursive part/subpart relationship.
OR
3b. Keep 'Institution' for the top-level part, and introduce another tupe, e.g. 'Institution constituent part'), for any part of it. There would then be a part/subpart relationship between 'Instutution' and 'Institution constituent part', and a recursive part/subpart relationship between Institution constituent parts.
Then, College/University would be defined as a type-of Institution, and the problem is solved.
Note that, if you don't go down this route, that the names for levels within Universities is notoriously variable, so it would be a very bad idea to assume (for example) that a University contains Colleges, which contain Departments.
A final note:
I am *not* a data modeller (as is no doubt evident from some of my language above. However, I know enough to know that it is easy to get things wrong, and, in this case, reasonably easy to get them right. I have no doubt that there are some pretty hot data modellers on the Freebase team, and I would strongly suggest that issues like this are given a fair bit of attention at this early stage. Fixing things later on, or allowing them just to evolve, are not good options.
We are planning to move the "Subsidiary Or Constituent Schools" property off of "college/university" and on to "institution", which will make it a normal recursive relationship. This will also allow other types of schools (Berkeley High School is one, apparently) to have subsidiary institutions.
Fraternities and sororities
Isn't that a little U.S. centric? In fact, I've not heard of them anywhere except in the U.S.
Could I suggest that moving that to a U.S. College/University type (in the same way that there's a U.S. City/Town type) would be a better solution?
Fraternities are a fairly American thing, but many of the US fraternities have chapters at Canadian colleges. Another solution might be to simply hide the fraternity property on the college side, but still have the fraternity/sorority type link to colleges.
As far as I can tell, fraternities and sororities (or their equivalents) are found in The Philippines and many countries in Europe, as well as North America. See, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fraternities_and_sororities_in_Europe and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fraternities_and_sororities_in_the_Philippines. It's possible that there's a more generic term for them, which we should use instead, that might be less North America-centric, however.
Tuition
How about adding average undergraduate and graduate tuition with the year that its quoted from?
I like this idea. Tuition is an imporant bit of information!
Accreditation
Many School systems around the world have regional systems that allow for accreditation. In the United States there are several regional accreditations. It would be nice to have later on for regional mapping of colleges and universities by their accreditation property. My vote to add Accreditation Property, or Accredited By. Example: The University of Louisiana at Lafayette is accredited by the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.
This is a good idea, and is something I've given some thought to. The main reason I haven't added it yet is that I couldn't find any open-source to populate it with, but since you've brought it up, and surely other people will be interested as well, I'll put it back in my queue.
IPEDS ID and OPE ID
I was looking at http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/ and was noticing that the Colleges in their college navigator contain IPEDS IDs (Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System) and OPE IDs ( http://www.ed.gov/offices/OSFAP/fsacoach/glossary/ope-id.html ). I am under the assumption that this information can be gleaned from the http://www.nces.ed.gov/ .
Thanks for the information, enlil. I will pass this post on to the data team.
