How to query Wikidata items using its labels?

Question

How can I query Wikidata to get all items that have labels contain a word? I tried this but didn\'t work; it retrieved nothing.

SELECT ?item ?itemLabel WHERE {
          


        

Answer 1

Yes, you can search by label, for example:

SELECT distinct ?item ?itemLabel ?itemDescription WHERE{  
  ?item ?label "Something"@en.  
  ?article schema:about ?item .
  ?article schema:inLanguage "en" .
  ?article schema:isPartOf <https://en.wikipedia.org/>. 
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". }    
}

see it on Query page.

Answer 2

As of today (June 2020), the best way to do this seems to be using these CirrusSearch extensions. The following does a substring search in all English labels and comes back with 10,000 results in <20 seconds. I believe it also searches in aliases and descriptions.

SELECT DISTINCT ?item ?label
WHERE
{
  SERVICE wikibase:mwapi
  {
    bd:serviceParam wikibase:endpoint "www.wikidata.org";
                    wikibase:api "Generator";
                    mwapi:generator "search";
                    mwapi:gsrsearch "inlabel:city"@en;
                    mwapi:gsrlimit "max".
    ?item wikibase:apiOutputItem mwapi:title.
  }
  ?item rdfs:label ?label. FILTER( LANG(?label)="en" )

}

Answer 3

Following your question and the useful comments provided, I ended up with this query

SELECT ?item ?itemLabel
WHERE { 
  ?item rdfs:label ?itemLabel. 
  FILTER(CONTAINS(LCASE(?itemLabel), "city"@en)). 
} limit 10

For which I got those results

item          itemLabel
wd:Q515       city
wd:Q7930989   city
wd:Q15253706  city
wd:Q532039    The Eternal City
wd:Q1969820   The Eternal City
wd:Q3986838   The Eternal City
wd:Q7732543   The Eternal City
wd:Q7737016   The Golden City
wd:Q5119      capital city
wd:Q1555      Guatemala City

try it here

Answer 4

As stated above, querying with case-insensitivity and truncation is very slow in SPARQL query service. I found this project on github: https://github.com/inventaire/entities-search-engine It sets up an ElasticSearch index which allows fast queries for use-cases like autocompletion.