Help:Spécial:Ask

The semantic search page, which can be found at is a special page providing an interface that assists users with creating and executing semantic queries.

Query construction
On the top of the page there are two text area fields. The first one, titled 'Query', is meant for the portion of the query for selecting pages. The second one, titled 'Additional data to display', is meant to hold the set of properties that are displayed for each queried page - see the help page on displaying information. Each property should be prepended with a question mark, just as is done in regular #ask queries.

As of this field has autocompletion on property names, meaning that you can start typing the beginning of a property name, and a set of completions will show up. You can also just type a question mark, and you will see the list of all properties defined on the wiki at once.

introduced an input assistance in the query conditions field, meaning that you can prompt for suggestions.CiteRef::gh:smw:2699 Depending on the suggestion prefix chosen you can trigger suggestions for:
 * prefix  for properties
 * prefix  for categories, and
 * prefix  for concepts.

Query parameters
As of, additional controls are shown under the text fields, which allow the user to pass parameters to the query that give extra control over how the data is displayed. The controls shown change according to the result format selected, as different formats support different parameters.

Running the query
You can run the query by hitting the 'find results' button in the lower left corner of the page, after which the results will be shown.

Downloading the results
introduced quick download links shown above the queried results to the right allowing to download them immediately in JSON, CSV, RSS and RDF.CiteRef::gh:smw:1407 See the screenshot on this page.

Customizing
Starting with and  respectively CiteRef::gh:smw:180 options for further customization were introduced:
 * CSS classes
 * can be used to change the parameter text display behaviour, e.g. font-size etc. (since )
 * can be used to change the query interface containing the following "sub-classes": (since )
 * can be used to change the input field "Query" for entering query conditions (since )
 * can be used to change the input field "Additional data to display" for entering the query printouts (since )
 * can be used to change the query interface containing the following "sub-class": (since )
 * can be used to change the appearance of the drop-down menue used for selecting the result format (since )


 * User preferences
 * 1) A setting to allow toggling between the standard parameter text or a compact info tooltip based display (since )
 * 2) A setting to enable the option box to be collapsed by default (since )