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. Alias versions are included here.
- The last field of the autocomplete menue offers a focused text search - a text search looking at labels, descriptions and independent pages (excluding separate name spaces such as discussion pages.
If you want to run a full text search of all the name spaces use this link from the menue, you can here select different FactGrid sections like help pages or Item discussion pages or project pages:
What links here
The menu's What links here link search is one on the most useful links in the entire menue. Use it if you have landed on a page with totally insufficient information in order to understand why this page has been created. You will get a list of all the pages that refer to the page you are on and you can use this knowledge to gain more information about this item.
The more complex searches are compiled in SPARQL
FactGrid can be queried in any imaginable complexity and the results can be displayed in tables, network graphs, on timelines or other visualisation. These more complex searches are run at the SPARQL endpoint:
There are plenty of introductions to 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 but that has to be opened with the "i" icon. If you click the icon, the two part screen opens up into a three part division: you will now be able to see how the interface writes SPARQL code for you - basic code for basic searches. More complex searches require direct scripting, which is not that trivial. The two central Wikidata manuals are:
- https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikidata_Query_Service/User_Manual
- https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:SPARQL_query_service/queries/examples
Both links are of limited use on FactGrid, since we are not sharing the data models (every new Wikibase installation is counting P-Numbers its own way and labels and design features will differ).
In the simplest search query you use the first input to "filter": You define which database objects you want to access with your search, for instance all "humans" - the input is here P2—Q7 you do not have to know the numbers, the query service is offering you the databases auto complete suggestions.
In the second step you should decide what exactly you want to see — with a command that can now ask for all the dates of birth for instance.
Press the blue button with the arrow (triangle) to activate the search.
In order to understand what you can search for you need to have an idea of properties on FactGrid 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