There is no stable release of the Wikibase Query functionality yet, and even in the development branch, the feature set is far short of what I guess you want to use.
If I can make a simple query on a single property to narrow down the list of items to something useful, I can use the Wikidata API plus processing within my own software to query things further. That with a healthy amount of caching so that performance isn't awful, should mean that I require only minimal functionality.
I just need to be able to do something like:
SELECT `qid` FROM Wikibase WHERE `Instance Of` = 'Elephant';
Using that list and the Wikibase API, I can do processing on my own of the returned data and take it from there.
One thing that is not entirely clear to me is if you want to query data from Wikidata.org, or from your own Wikibase Repository instance.
My own Wikibase Repository instance. I believe that I can use https://wdq.wmflabs.org/ plus the API to query from Wikidata if I need to.
In any case, have you considered Semantic MediaWiki for your use case? http://semantic-mediawiki.org/
Yes. I believe that Wikibase fits the use requirements a little bit better.
Any help would be appreciated, it looks like Wikibase documentation for reusers is not terribly great yet.
Indeed. We have essentially no user documentation on the features of the software that is not specific to Wikidata.org. Then again, we also do not have stable releases or usable release notes for our main applications (Wikibase Repository and Wikibase Client) suitable for third party users. I hope we can improve these things in the near future, though one has to hold into account that third party users are not amongst the first priorities of the main developer of the Wikibase software, the Wikidata team.
Certainly! I wasn't expecting there to be much out there and I completely understand that the priorities of the team are with Wikidata and not with Third Party reuse.
If I can figure out how to get everything installed and running, I'd be more than happy to write up a how-to so that other third party reusers will have an easier time in the future.
Thank you, Derric Atzrott