Education

Education: Fair use of academic journal indexes

2008-09-02T14:56:47.0019Z

It would be great to have some serious bibliographic data on academic journal articles. Would it be within copyright law to download biblographic data from a proprietary index and then use a custom script to extract and repackege the data into a freebase friendly form and then to bulk upload the lot?

It seems to me that as long as all the information in the index is available freely to be public, this should not be a violation of copyright. Obviously a distinction would have to be made between those indexes which simply provide publically available bibliographic data and those which actually generate content that could be considered proprietary (e.g., an index which provides an abstracting service).

Would any copyright experts care to weigh in on this?

Field Of Study: Broader / narrower?

2008-09-02T00:09:20.0005Z

Just posting this to crosspost this disscussion.

Field Of Study: Broader / narrower?

2008-09-02T00:06:29.0012Z

I agree. Currently, for example, philosophy, ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics are all simply "feilds of study". That's fine as far as it goes, but within the philosophy feild of study type we should be able to specify that ethics, epistemolgoy and metaphysics are subdisciplines. I'm not sure what a good name for the reciprocal property of "super-discipline" would be. Perhaps something like "is a subdiscipline of"

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

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".

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.

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)

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?

Education: University Systems?

2007-10-18T22:35:01.0007Z

I think either approach would work well. A lot of educational institutions have components ("campuses," "schools," or "departments"), so it seems reasonable to me to support this in the most generic fashion.

Education: University Systems?

2007-10-16T21:55:56.0007Z

If we fixed "educational institution" so that it had both parent and subsidiary institutions, would that fix the problem? Or do you think that a university system is more distinct, and should have a separate type?

Education: University Systems?

2007-10-16T20:56:59.0012Z

University Systems (such as the University of North Carolina or University of California) don't seem to be fully supported. These are certainly not "Colleges" or "Universities." I would call them "Educational Institutions," but those don't currently permit member institutions. (Both of these are marked as "College/University" right now for this reason.)

There's a bunch of crap here. For example, a lot of people seem to be marked as students of "University of North Carolina" (which I've just renamed to "University of North Carolina System" to reduce confusion) when they probably should have been marked as students of "UNC Chapel Hill" (the school most often intended when people refer to "University of North Carolina").

Education: Type for 'eventlike' educational structures

2007-10-02T20:57:23.0000Z

Yep. I'm going to try these ideas in my domain. We'll see where I get.

Education: Type for 'eventlike' educational structures

2007-10-02T17:30:31.0007Z

That's a good question. I could imagine a type called something like "master class" or "seminar" (or something else that would encompass those ideas) for educational events, one-off classes, etc., and the education domain makes sense as a home for these sorts of things. I'm not entirely sure what properties it should have, but if you want to try to model it in your private domain, you could test out the structure there and we could migrate it the root-level education domain once it's ready.

Education: Type for 'eventlike' educational structures

2007-10-02T14:39:14.0005Z

I'm wondering where to put graduate programs or even more informal educational »institutions« that have an 'identity' but at the same time behave like events.

An example of the former: the »arts, computation, engineering« graduate program at UC Irvine (http://ace.uci.edu/)
for the latter: http://framework.v2.nl/archive/archive/node/event/default.xslt/nodenr-153980 (a master class called »Making Art of Databases« which is decidedly *not* part of any formal program, yet educational in nature).

Education: Educational Institution Datasets

2007-08-05T15:12:36.0007Z

Done.

Education: Campuses

2007-08-04T17:25:04.0004Z

I think there should be a campus field for institutions that would allow us to specify at what campuses it has.

Education: School Principle

2007-07-19T16:59:54.0007Z

This should be added using the "employees" property. If that property is missing, add "employer" as a type to the school. This allows not only principals/headmasters/etc. to be included, but all other staff and faculty as well, without requiring a separate property or label for each type of employee. All educational institutions should have "employer" as a type as well, but many of them don't because they were created before the employer type existed.

Education: School Principle

2007-07-19T14:43:03.0011Z

I might be missing it, but we don't seem to have a principle property for schools, I thought this would be a useful addition. On that note, the position of head (teacher) of a school may go by other names around the world.