We incorporate items identifying academic disciplines (or "sciences") in the GeoKB to support two main use cases:

Scientific capacity assessments where we often group people and other "capital assets" based on the scientific disciplines they are mostly affiliated with.
Academic discipline can sometimes be an important qualifier to use in defining the context for a particular work or concept, which will mean something different depending on the discipline in which it is being used.

We will continue fleshing this part of the concept space over time with new disciplines and "sub-disciplines." The USGS Thesaurus category for sciences served as the initial source.

Query for academic disciplines

PREFIX wd: <https://geokb.wikibase.cloud/entity/>
PREFIX wdt: <https://geokb.wikibase.cloud/prop/direct/>

SELECT ?method ?methodLabel ?method_alt_label ?subclass_of ?subclass_ofLabel
WHERE {
  ?method wdt:P2* wd:Q158710 ; # Gets all subclasses of academic discipline
          wdt:P2 ?subclass_of . # gets the subclass identifier itself so we can graph this
  OPTIONAL {
    ?method skos:altLabel ?method_alt_label . # gets any aliases individually so we can run name matching
    FILTER (lang(?method_alt_label)='en')
  }
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en" . }
}

Try it!

Classification

Within the broader knowledge context of the GeoKB, we placed these under the following concept classification:

entity -> collective entity -> system -> conceptual system -> academic discipline

We may revisit this in future as we continue to work through query use cases.

Initially, we opted to bring all USGS Thesaurus "sciences" items as represented but using subclass relationships vs. the broader/narrower Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) language used in the Thesaurus.

Item talk:Q158710

Query for academic disciplines

Classification