Chinese School Comparison Map

[djkasumi]

Hey there,

While I've been going through my own process of finding the "right kind of place" for me to study Chinese in China, I've been thinking of creating a GIS database that would (eventually) be served as an interactive map for people interested in visually comparing schools and universities.

The focus will be comparison of statistics for universities with "Chinese as a foreign language" programs, including things such as:

- Tuition costs

- Dorm/housing costs on campus

- Total number of students

- Total number of international students

- Campus size/area

- Possibly a few climate statistics

- Relevant local/city statistics

If there is any interest in this sort of thing (I don't think anything like this currently exists for this purpose, but I could be wrong), then let me know. Collecting data might be a little more difficult due to (correct me if I'm wrong, but it sometimes appears this way) simply the lack of organization and availability. So, if you have any possible data sources, that would help too.

[歐博思]

A while back, I actually thought about starting a project like this but for vocubulary differences among dialects.

I like it.

[panpan86]

Hi djkasumi,

Yes people are thinking about this, haha! We have actually just launched a site similar to the one you described. So far it is dedicated to student reviews of schools, but we will slowly be integrating it with our main site which already has a database of about 20,000 courses including university info including campus size, number of students, course fees etc. If you want to have a look, I can send you the link (it's in beta) - I'd love to hear your feedback.

Peter

[djkasumi]

Peter:

Based on your sig, I'm going to assume that it's from CUCAS, right? Sounds good, I'd be interested in taking a look. CUCAS has always been a great resource, but because I'm a map nerd and geography major, that's where I got the idea to maybe to put all that kind of information together in visual format.

[panpan86]

You assume right! I'll send you some links via PM, would really love your thoughts.

[djkasumi]

For those of you who might be interested in contributing, I'm still in the process of collecting data and organizing it into my own database (which is going to be very time consuming, and I'm only but one undergraduate student ).

I'm currently gathering climate data from the China Meteorological Administration (http://www.cma.gov.cn/), and school data from university websites.

[djkasumi]

Hey all. I've been getting some work in on this project more recently. The interface is about 75% done, and probably 60% or more of the Javascript is done (working with OpenLayers).

So what does this mean? Well, at this point, all I need to determine is how to best continue to get data and create a database of information on Chinese universities (as stated before, specifically those offering short/long term Chinese language study). I've been using a very small dataset that I set up by hand to do testing.

If you'd like to contribute, I have set up a GoogleDocs Table that is open to public editing. You can take a look at what kind of information is needed and what kind of information will be presented in the map; the table can be found here. Each column is labeled and commented so you can get an idea of what I'm aiming for. Because this data will be used in a map interface, I'm aiming for some specific types of information; however, these, in theory, will be good numbers and indicators that a person can extrapolate from (for example: if the cost 1 semester of normal class is relatively cheap, then the cost of an intensive program at the same school should be relatively cheap as well).

If you have any suggestions, please leave them here.

I should be able to host the map online maybe after a couple of weeks to give people an idea of what the end result will look like.