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/
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')
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.
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?
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