Help:How do I search FactGrid?

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Basic Item and full text search

The search field at the top right offers two different search functions.

In bold, hits in the database are displayed first, and the alias versions for the objects are also included. The last field of the unfolding offer offers the restricted full text search - a search restricted to title words, words in the descriptions and independent pages, which thus remains oriented to the content offered by the database.

• Advanced full text search

With the Advanced fulltext search (in the menu on the left) the entire FatGrid range can be searched selectively for the texts and titles. The "namespaces" of the entire project are recorded here with the database, the project pages (the FactGrid namespace), help pages (the help namespace), user page, discussion rooms - in total with all rooms that are available in the simple full-text search in Search field at the top right are hidden for now.

The selection options are interesting here, for example if you know that you definitely read certain information on a discussion page.

What links here

The What links here link in the menu navigation offers a very important search. With each page you are on, it can be used to record which pages link to them.

This offer is particularly interesting if you have found a search that appears erratic. With the query "What links here" you can grasp the context of this page and understand which answers this data object should deliver.

The more complex searches are done compiled in SPARQL

The FactGrid can be queried as complex as desired and the search results can be displayed in different ways. This is done using the search language SPARQL and the following SPARQL endpoint:

• https://database.factgrid.de/query/

There are plenty of handouts for SPARQL on the Internet. In practice, the query language is a significant hurdle; even the first steps are not clear: there is an input help that can be created with the "i" icon. If you click this, the screen is divided into three parts: you now have an input help on the left and the search script on the right.

• https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikidata_Query_Service/User_Manual
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:SPARQL_query_service/queries/examples

In the simplest form of the search query, a "filter" must be set in one step. It defines which database objects are recorded with which property.

In the second step of the simplest searches, it is determined what properties (properties, P numbers) are queried and displayed. Inquiries that involve qualifiers become more complicated, even more complicated inquiries that go into queried database objects and ask further questions there.

The search is sent using the blue arrow key.

Regardless of the SPARQL instructions that can be found on the Internet and on the Wikidata help pages, research in the specific database requires that you know how statements in the database are made and how.

With these deficits, SPARQL remains a brilliant search language, since it is precisely the unwieldy properties that create the openness to be able to deal with a Wikibase instance as complex as possible. In SPARQL queries and visualizations are quickly possible, the typical search templates of library and archive catalogs are never carried out.

"Sample queries" as a practical introduction

In practice, "sample queries" prove to be the first choice. With them you can find practical searches, because you can now change the parameters that interest you in your own search. This can be, for example, a question about documents from a certain author, which now allows you to switch the author of your own interest to the search field.

Again, the first step is to divide the screen in advance by the i-Icon in order to access the input help that you want to edit.

See the query in your language

When setting the language, there is usually a comparison with the browser language. If the search is not carried out in the language of your choice (German, English or French), you can set the desired language in the top right of the SPARQL search interface screen.

The future: independent user interfaces

The future of Wikibase will foreseeably lie in projects that generate their own user interfaces, via which users direct their search queries to the database.

In the FactGrid Blog there is a report from a project of the Potsdam University of Applied Sciences, which communicates with Wikidada as the project database using such a template:

"Archive guide to the German colonial period" online - a conversation with Uwe Jung, Potsdam University of Applied Sciences, about the use of Wikidata as a research platform https://blog.factgrid.de/archives/1215