Education

Education: Accreditation?

2008-08-22T07:11:05.0000Z

I like the model.

In terms of data source within the US the Department of Education has a public-facing database that allows searches:

It doesn't support returning all results at once (too many, says the web site). Choosing the "WASC, Accrediting Commission for Schools" as the accrediting agency, however, I got 209 results back: not bad. Getting to the year of accreditation requires an additional mouse click, but I'm sure someone on the data team can figure out a more automatic way of getting all the data in one piece. Better yet, perhaps the Department of Education would be willing to share this data with the Freebase community in a more portable format.

Education: Accreditation?

2008-08-21T21:22:22.0012Z

I was right -- I had messed with this before:

https://sandbox.freebase.com/view/education/accreditation

Let me know what you think. I'll post this to data-modeling as well.

Education: Accreditation?

2008-08-21T20:41:57.0012Z

Should be easy enough to do; I think I had mocked something up awhile back but there wasn't much interest at the time. I'll try to dig it up. Any thoughts on a data source?

Education: Accreditation?

2008-08-21T18:21:15.0017Z

Hi, I didn't see a property for entering accreditation info for an Educational Institution. I'd like to request it be added if it doesn't yet exist. It should include the authority that gives the accreditation as well.

Education: School Districts with same name

2008-08-14T23:16:04.0012Z

Yes, the LEAID should help so we don't assign the wrong locations and schools, etc to the districts. Thanks

Education: School Districts with same name

2008-08-14T22:19:07.0000Z

They are definitely for different Burlingtons. We are working on getting more information about them loaded, like connecting them to schools and cities, but I couldn't say when that will be done. We might be able to at least put them in states for now, which should help a little bit. We've also unhidden the LEAID property, which is just a unique identifier used by the NCES; it's not very interesting, but it should at least let people know that these are different districts, even if it's not readily obvious which district it is. If you want to help out with these efforts, let me know, and I'll put you in touch with the people working on this project.

Education: School Districts with same name

2008-08-14T20:50:20.0017Z

I noticed there are 4 entries for Burlington School District. My guess is they are for different Burlingtons, however none have anything to determine which are which. And I'm sure there are other school districts that share names.

Should we just assign states to these topics, or is there a way to figure out what the individual topics are for?

I don't want to tag one as Vermont, for example, if it is already linked elsewhere in some way that I can't see.

Education: Notorious Professors

2008-08-14T20:48:06.0012Z

Yes, "Notable" or "Eminent Professors" would do very well. I started a "Teaching type" but have no clue how to go on from here. I would have liked to see the "Students/Graduates" and the "Professors" at a glance though

Educational Institution: Notorious Professors

2008-08-14T20:48:06.0012Z

Education: Notorious Professors

2008-08-14T19:35:04.0012Z

I don't think that a separate property for "famous" (for whatever definition of fame someone wants to use) professors is a good idea for the types in the commons domains. We don't separate "famous" alumni, or "famous" employees in other industries separately. I can see where it would be interesting to find out about them, but have a duplicate property would mean that either the data had to be entered twice or the information about an institution's faculty would be stored differently in two places, making it harder to query that data. If you (or someone) wanted to create a "Notable Professor" type in a private domain that delegated some of the properties from the education/empolyment models, though, I think that would be a very interesting way to do this.

Educational Institution: Notorious Professors

2008-08-14T19:35:04.0012Z

Education: Notorious Professors

2008-08-14T18:37:42.0012Z

Certainly, but I do not mean "normal" professors but real famous ones such as Nobel Prize Winners, notorious artists who teach, and so on... Every institution has some famous alumni and it would be nice to have a place where one can list the exceptional teachers as well. They are special, or not ??

Educational Institution: Notorious Professors

2008-08-14T18:37:42.0012Z

Education: Notorious Professors

2008-08-14T18:09:05.0012Z

Professors (and any other faculty or staff) can be added using the "employees" property on the "employer" type. (All educational institutions should be typed as Employer; if one isn't, feel free to add the Employer type.) If you want to add non-faculty professors (visiting professors, research fellows, and the like), you can add the "academic institution" type, which has properties for these types of roles.

Educational Institution: Notorious Professors

2008-08-14T18:09:05.0012Z

Education: Notorious Professors

2008-08-14T16:14:17.0011Z

A very interesting and necessary new property is Notorious Professors

Educational Institution: Notorious Professors

2008-08-14T16:14:17.0011Z

A very interesting and necessary new property is Notorious Professors

Mount Vernon High School: oops, don't merge these

2008-08-08T21:19:02.0017Z

one is in washington state, one is in virginia

University of South Dakota - Springfield: Mascot & Colors

2008-08-08T17:33:40.0017Z

The mascot of USDS was the Pointers, right? What were the school colors?

International Affairs: Split

2008-07-24T22:49:16.0010Z

The field of study should be split from the journal.

Yale University: yale college and yale university?

2008-07-24T14:54:09.0000Z

Wikipedia tends to classify by the broadest institution, so there are a lot of actors associated with Yale University instead of the drama school. I think it's fine that we start with the lower-precision classification and as data becomes available, replace it with the more specific.

Prospect High School: No useful info and no WP article

2008-07-18T20:15:48.0005Z

This was harvested from Wikipedia but has since been deleted there; it has no useful information nor any links and should be deleted.

Educational Institution: Field for founder?

2008-07-03T22:55:31.0005Z

We have a field for the date of foundation, but there isn't one for the founder. e.g. Sir George Downing for Downing College

Would this be a useful addition?

Fraternity/Sorority: Lack of data about society members

2008-06-12T07:20:36.0007Z

James, fraternities and other clubs are modeled as instances of Organization. Take a look at St. Anthony Hall, which I’ve done some work on, populating its membership. Any student organization (with the exception of sports teams) should be modeled this way.

Fraternity/Sorority: Lack of data about society members

2008-06-12T06:46:55.0005Z

Without knowing who has been members of these organizations, this isn't as useful as it could be. Perhaps something like "Clubs and Societies" could be an addition to the Education field of the Person type?

Educational Institution: Parent institution

2008-06-12T02:48:37.0000Z

We here at Metaweb have a triumvirate of precognitives working around the clock to stay one step ahead of schema refactorings like this!

Educational Institution: Parent institution

2008-06-12T02:23:28.0007Z

Good thing I pointed it out today or he wouldn't have posted that two days ago! I actually stumbled onto this type when researching the structure of some teaching related schema seemingly out of the blue. His post must have influenced me. Maybe I should start wearing a foil beanie...

Educational Institution: Parent institution

2008-06-12T00:06:15.0008Z

The "parent institution" thing is a known bug -- Bryan's actually in the process of fixing it. See his post on the developers mailing list. Renaming the faculty property is a good idea.

Educational Institution: Parent institution

2008-06-11T21:32:48.0005Z

Why does the "Parent institution" property of this type point to College/university if this type can be used to describe primary and secondary institutions? Shouldn't it point back to itself and have a linked in property of "Subsidiary institution"?

Another suggestion is that "Faculty" (dated integer) should be renamed to "Number of faculty".

Literature: Merge with the other "Literature" instance

2008-06-10T09:29:54.0012Z

Duplicate of Literature. Merge please.

Catamount: duplicate

2008-06-09T18:51:44.0005Z

of catamount. I think we use the singular version for mascots.

Transport: Types of Transport

2008-06-04T02:25:26.0012Z

I suggest that types be added corresponding to the 'Aspects' of transport in the article, for example 'Transport Vehicle' which would include cars & bikes. 'Transport Infrastructure' would be a better name for the current 'Transportation' which is now all about roadways etc.

Hope this makes sense - I'm new here.

Educational Institution: Property for school sports teams?

2008-05-19T21:01:10.0000Z

We just added a type for this: School sports team. It's a little underpopulated now, so please feel free to stick in some teams!

School: School Grade Level or type

2008-05-07T05:04:05.0012Z

Looks like there is already a type called College/University which is exactly what I'm looking for. Sorry.

School: School Grade Level or type

2008-05-07T04:58:24.0000Z

I would agree that the primary/secondary/postsecondary is, at best, a US based thing. Though I don't know that 12th grade is a signifier of the end of high school worldwide either.

Would it be appropriate to add a flag for "Higher Education" as defined here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_education

My goal is to be able to separate higher education institutions from other schools and currently it is very dificult to do.

Monterey: please split

2008-05-06T22:37:52.0023Z

into a citytown and school_district

School: School Grade Level or type

2008-05-06T02:38:21.0000Z

The School instances have lowest and highest grade properties; are these insufficient? The breakdown you list does not generalize well to other countries or even to variant US schools, so unless there’s a compelling reason, I would hesitate to impose this breakdown.

School: School Grade Level or type

2008-05-06T01:04:21.0005Z

Is there a way to signify the following types:

Primary school (USA is K - 8)

Secondary school (USA is 9-12)

Postsecondary school (USA is all above 12)

Bloomfield: Split into a town and a school district

2008-04-28T17:41:31.0012Z

(Bloomfield School District)

Educational Institution: Property for school sports teams?

2008-04-25T23:13:56.0012Z

Hi, I suggest adding a "Sports Teams" property to Eductional Institution. This would allow users looking at Indiana University, for example, to see a link to the Indiana Hoosiers men's basketball team.

Dissertation: Writing, Surviving, and Finishing Dissertations

2008-04-25T17:52:50.0000Z

Not sure what advice you want; just post it again wherever you initially meant to. (Perhaps on the Dissertation topic, which is actually called Thesis?) BTW, you can add links to posts; no need to just list the URL in text.

Dissertation: Writing, Surviving, and Finishing Dissertations

2008-04-25T15:53:43.0007Z

But I posted that in the wrong place! Please advise, thanks, jf

Dissertation: Writing, Surviving, and Finishing Dissertations

2008-04-25T15:52:37.0012Z

There's life after your dissertation, even if that's hard to believe. Writing's as much manual labor as mental, as much about rituals of time and space and resonance as about methods, and about knowing that our fingers can lead our minds to new places, fresh ideas and implications. But dissertations are often hell, a kind of writing you'll never do again: they're lonelier experiences, riskier, longer and slower pushes uphill than most other writing you'll ever do. At least that's some of what's in the essay, "Notes on Academic Writing," that I wrote years ago to avoid writing a conference paper—and I've found that this essay has had an underground existence ever since, being passed along from one dissertation writer to another delighted to see that someone else was as miserable as they were and went on, nevertheless, to publish a good deal of material and not perish after all. That essay can be found at: http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/jff1/learningacadwrtg.htm

Still, I do wish someone had shown me John Trimble's wonderful Writing with Style!

College/University: IPEDS ID and OPE ID

2008-04-23T14:49:51.0000Z

Thanks for the information, enlil. I will pass this post on to the data team.

College/University: IPEDS ID and OPE ID

2008-04-23T01:51:26.0005Z

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/ .

Dissertation: Fields of study aren't dissertations

2008-04-11T19:20:55.0019Z

We should probably take a closer look at the property names of the very complex education CVT. Users see that someone has a Ph.D. with a dissertation on Chemistry, and so they enter the dissertation as Chemistry, rather than Chemistry being the field or major, and Interactions of nonorganic sulfur with dihydrogen monoxide or what have you for the dissertation.

Dissertation: Fields of study aren't dissertations

2008-04-11T19:16:45.0005Z

... are they? How come "Chemistry" and the like are typed as dissertation?

Educational Institution: For our data/geolocation/graphical mapping efforts...School district properties?

2008-04-10T23:02:27.0007Z

We have some of that -- school address, schools in the district -- already (see type School district). Area et al. are a good idea; we could do this just by co-typing school districts as locations. I think we should be able to get enrollment numbers pretty easily -- there's a database with that information kicking around somewhere. I think any of these values would be good additions, but I do think I'd like to wait to see what kind of data is freely available before adding properties. These folks are obviously getting it from somewhere, though, so it's surely out there.

I'll add "location" as an included type now.

(Your home school district seems to have an alarming problem with decling enrollment, I can't help but notice.)

Educational Institution: For our data/geolocation/graphical mapping efforts...School district properties?

2008-04-10T21:40:09.0000Z

Well, it would be interesting to find the actual school enrollment area (where the child is eligible to go to that school by geocode info as drawn on a map by freebase).

See a visual representation of the school district in the same manner as above.

What school district is the school a part of? School district address/basic info?

Basic census data?

District Statistics

School Information
Number of Schools: 10
Number of Students: 5,952
Number of Teachers: 262
Number of Males: 2,988
Number of Females: 2,918
Area: 252.7 square miles

Number of Students Per Grade

1st Grade

2nd Grade

3rd Grade

4th Grade

5th Grade

6th Grade

7th Grade

8th Grade

9th Grade

10th Grade

11th Grade

12th Grade

926

988

1,048

1,016

947

738

Numbers of Students

Educational Institution: For our data/geolocation/graphical mapping efforts...School district properties?

2008-04-10T19:53:36.0000Z

We have some basic properties for school districts. We could add lots more, of course, but short of a viable data-source, most of them will probably sit empty. What properties would you suggest.