New Comments : University Ideas

Comment by owen.patel

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 06:28:31 PDT

As far as I can see UKRLP doesn't provide a URI, only an identifying number? I'm not saying that it shouldn't be the UKPRN that is adopted, but that it needs to go further to meet my original suggestion.

It's a shame that UKRLP doesn't seem to have any machine based interfaces that could be used to help decode other identifiers (e.g. name, website) to the UKPRN - or am I missing something?

Comment by scott.bradley.wilson

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Most already have a directory and a HR database; the question is what to expose publicly and how. FOAF is possible; so is VCard/hCard.

Back in the day HEIs also had X500 services :-)

Comment by scott.bradley.wilson

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Isn't this the same as getting an XCRI feed from a school rather than the university catalogue?

Or is this more like getting an org chart as data?

Comment by scott.bradley.wilson

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:00:00 PDT

This has already been done - its your UKPRN, and is in the UK Register of Learning Providers

http://www.ukrlp.co.uk/

Every HEI, FEI, school, training provider, etc has one.

Comment by Chriskeene

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 00:00:00 PDT

I would guess all. Or at least most. Every head of department must know which school/faculty dean they report to.

Sussex, where I work, had traditionally had unusal strutures, but everyone knew what schools existed. If at least for administrative tasks such as exams, timetabling etc.

Chris

Comment by owen.patel

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Could make use of http://vocab.org/aiiso-roles/schema and FOAF?

Although if you think Universities don't know what their own structure is, the chances of them knowing (truly) who is on the payroll seems remote!

Comment by owen.patel

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 00:00:00 PDT

The problem here (I suspect) is that there are actually several different possible identifiers depending on context. These are maintained by different organisations, so asking the University to maintain the list seems unfair (and impractical).

However, what institutions can do is establish their own identifier using a URI. Then other identifiers could be decoded to this when necessary.

See suggestion for 'Institutional Address' for the question of location - I'd see this including Geocoding ideally as well. I've suggested FOAF but I'm not sure whether (a) this is suitable for organisations and (b) whether it provides the ability to hold location information at the right level (and as you point out, what would be the 'location')

Comment by Tony Hirst

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 00:00:00 PDT

I think there are already unique identifiers for HEIs - HEFCE distribute them?

What would be ideal would be a data source that contains HEFCE id, university name, and maybe alternatives (e.g. Leeds University, University of Leeds, or Queen Mary, QMW etc; Parsing out London Colleges can be a real pain too...) whether or not they are the 'real'name of the institution (just commonly used variants of it), along with other unique identifiers (eg homepage uri - but even then there may be alternatives - an 'old' uri and a new one (EPSRC has some quaint URIs for listed HEIs I think?)

Geo data could be as lat long, or postcode, of the main reception...

For college based HEIs or HEIs with miultiple sites, we need another sort of geo table?

See for example:
http://ouseful.wordpress.com/2009/02/16/mashcombining-data-from-three-separate-sources-using-dabble-db/

Comment by jim.rhizome

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 00:00:00 PDT

But how many universities have a full and up-to-date picture of their own organisational structure?

Comment by Tony Hirst

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Provide a common API to query/interrogate individual HEI XCRI databases?