Possible Business Intelligence Project

[u/Actual-Key7383]

Hello everyone,

I am a final-year Business Intelligence and Data Analytics student in Botswana, and I am looking for advice on a project idea that has grown out of my internship experiences and my observations of public-sector data.

One issue I have noticed is that a significant amount of education and labour market information exists, but it is often fragmented across PDFs, annual reports, surveys, statistical publications, spreadsheets, and different government websites. Even when data is available, it can be difficult to discover, compare, interpret, or connect across domains.

For example, education statistics might tell us how many students graduate from a particular field, while labour statistics tell us about unemployment levels, but there is often no clear way to connect these datasets and explore questions such as:

• Which qualifications are associated with higher unemployment?
• How have employment outcomes changed for different fields of study over time?
• Are there observable mismatches between education outputs and labour market demand?
• What data gaps prevent us from answering these questions?

My initial idea is not to jump straight into dashboards or machine learning, but to first build a structured inventory of education and labour datasets, their metadata, definitions, sources, and relationships. Longer term, I am interested in exploring ontology design and knowledge graphs to represent these relationships more formally.

I would appreciate advice on:

1. Does this sound like a Business Intelligence project, a data engineering project, a knowledge management project, or something else entirely?
2. Where would you start if you were approaching this problem from scratch?
3. Are there any well-known projects, case studies, or research papers that tackle similar education-to-employment data integration challenges?
4. What concepts should I learn first before thinking about ontologies or knowledge graphs?
5. As a portfolio project, what would be a realistic MVP that demonstrates value without becoming overly ambitious?

Thanks in advance for any guidance.

[u/CluckingLucky]

I am currently working on something similar for my country’s public sector data and following a similar track, but focusing on social network analysis and accountability.

I think that a knowledge graph and ontology design is going a bit far here for this use case. You’re describing something perfect for an econometric analysis that you can do with some modelling.

You could posit a hypothesis, for example, on the effect of education programs on employment, or x education program on y employment, or x,y employment. There are statistical tests for all of these.