Skip to content
uwwoe docs

Scope and coverage

This page tells you what data is currently in the published index, what isn’t, and how to read the numbers.

Current coverage

The candidate published index covers:

PopulationApproximate count
Course listings~1,925
Credentials (degrees, majors, minors, options, specializations)~137
Requirement conditions~9,182

Coverage is the complete current-undergraduate Kuali catalog Faculty-of-Mathematics group plus the support-subject closure used by Math and Engineering requirements. In practice that means:

  • Every Math-subject course in the current Kuali catalog (MATH, PMATH, AMATH, CO, CS, STAT, ACTSC, etc.).
  • Every non-Math subject that is required as a prerequisite or alternative by at least one Math or Engineering credential (ECON, PHYS, CHEM, etc.).

It does not include:

  • Faculties outside Mathematics and Engineering’s Math-adjacent support (Arts, Health, Environment, Science non-Math).
  • Historical courses removed from the current catalog.
  • Section-level timetable data (sections, professors, times, rooms).
  • Course offering frequency, enrolment caps, or waitlist status.

If you are in a non-Math program, uwwoe is currently of limited use to you. Future coverage expansion is tracked under Phase P9 and beyond.

Why our number disagrees with Waterloo’s

Waterloo’s public materials commonly cite a higher Faculty of Mathematics course count — figures of 500+ to close-to-600 Math-subject courses are quoted in marketing copy. uwwoe’s local Math-subject count comes in lower. The numbers count different populations:

  • Waterloo’s marketing figure typically includes all current and historical Math-subject courses across the catalog’s lifetime, all cross-listings counted independently, and may include graduate-level courses.
  • uwwoe’s index figure counts only courses present in the current undergraduate Kuali catalog at index build time, with cross-listings deduplicated against the canonical entry.

The full reconciliation, with subject-by-subject counts, lives at Math course count reconciliation.

The honest summary: uwwoe’s coverage is narrower than Waterloo’s marketing implies, and it is labeled as such — there is no “complete Math coverage” claim anywhere in the site.

Release status

The index is release-gated. The backend serves only artifacts labeled approved or approved_with_warnings; never rejected or missing a release decision. See ADR 0007 for the gate policy.

The current candidate index has been validated locally but a reviewed, publishable distribution artifact for public V1 is still a Phase P9 deliverable — see the roadmap.

Index freshness

When the index was last built is shown in the response of GET /api/v1/index (the data.build_metadata.built_at field) and on the in-app diagnostics surface. The index is not updated continuously; it is rebuilt out-of-band and republished as a deployment operation. Expect freshness on the order of “rebuilt when the catalog changes” rather than “continuous mirror”.

Heads-up: catalog versioning

Every plan you save in uwwoe is pinned to a specific catalog_version_id. When the underlying catalog moves, your existing plan is not auto-migrated; you will be prompted with a migration preview before any state change is applied to the new catalog version. See ADR 0004 for the migration policy.