How to search LBT

Simple searches

You can use the MediaWiki Search box on any LBT page to do a simple search.

Categories and Properties

LBT has a number of extra features behind the scenes which allow complex searches to be made. For example, you could use the Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) search to find all female bookbinders working between 1700 and 1750 with parents who were also book binders.

You can look at the list of available categories for complex searches here: Special:Categories. If you click on one of these categories, it will create a display of all the records which are tagged with that category.

You can do the same with Special:Properties. For example, Birth date of type Date (1,843 uses) tells you that the property name is "Birth date" and that 1,843 people pages have values for that property. Clicking on the Property will produce a list of all the people for whom a date of birth is recorded. Not all of the Properties will produce useful output when clicked on its own.

Semantic searches

LBT is built using Semantic MediaWiki which means that complex searches can be constructed using these Categories and Properties. You can see some examples of this on the page Semantic query examples. You will see that creating the instructions for these searches and their output is somewhat complicated.

In fact, only logged-in LBT editors are able to create pages like this. However, ordinary users are able to use a special search page without being logged in: Special:Ask.

We will now explain how to use this page to build moderately complicated searches.

Building a semantic search

Add some categories

On the Special:Ask page, the input box labelled 'Condition' is where we put the things we want to search for. Type in a LBT Category such 'Female'. The Semantic MediaWiki syntax requires this to have a special markup: type it exactly like this:

[[Category:Female]]

If you now click on the Find Results tab, you will see a table of the first 50 of several hundred females listed in LBT. Each line is a link which you can click to go to her specific page.

If you now add a second category, SMW will search and display results which match both categories (logical AND). Now type

[[Category:Female]] [[Category:Pensioners]]

and click on Find Results. You will now see a list of the first 50 female pensioners of the Stationers' Company (mainly widows of deceased members).

Add some properties

We can reduce the list of Company female pensioners by adding Birth date and Death date properties to the list of search conditions. Again, this requires using the appropriate SMW notation for the query: