How do I find the list of available qualifiers for a given EntityProperty?

Question

If you read the docs for EntityProperty you see it can be used with EntityValue to perform qualified selections of data, improving efficiency of queries, etc.

Unfortunately the docs only say this:

EntityProperty[type, pname,{qual1->val1,qual2->val2,…}]
represents a property modified by the qualifier rules quali->vali.

and nothing about how to figure out what's valid for quali

So how do we do this?

Answer 1

It appears you can do queries on an EntityProperty too, with EntityValue. There's another question, here, which is what are the valid EntityProperty properties, but at least for what we care about we have this:

EntityValue[
 EntityProperty["..."],
 "Qualifiers"
 ]

Here's a fun example:

AssociationThread[
   CanonicalName@#,
   EntityValue[#, "Qualifiers"]
   ] &@RandomSample[EntityProperties@"Country", 10]

<|"ExternalBalance" -> {"CurrencyUnit", "Date", "PercentOfGDP", 
   "TradeSection"}, "ISOCertificationOwnership" -> {"Date"}, 
 "CapitalCity" -> {"Date"}, 
 "BenefitsCostIndex" -> {"Date", "Frequency", "SeasonalAdjustment", 
   "TimeSeriesOperator"}, 
 "RoadSectorGasolineFuelConsumption" -> {"Date", "PerCapita"}, 
 "FederalDebt" -> {"Adjustment", "Date", "FederalDebtHolder", 
   "Frequency", "Modifier", "SeasonalAdjustment", 
   "TimeSeriesOperator"}, 
 "EmploymentToPopulationRatio" -> {"AgeClass", "Date", "Gender"}, 
 "HospitalBedsPer10000Population" -> {"Date"}, 
 "AgriculturalProductionIndex" -> {"Date"}, 
 "TotalFertilityRate" -> {"Date", "DateRange"}|>

Then we can use it like so:

EntityValue[
  countryclass,
  EntityProperty["Country", 
   "ExternalBalance", {"Date" -> 
     Interval[{DateObject["1992"], DateObject["2005"]}]}
   ]
  ] // Short

But it's not trivial to figure out how these work in general...

EntityValue[
  countryclass,
  EntityProperty["Country", 
   "ExternalBalance", {"CurrencyUnit" -> "Euros"}
   ]
  ] // DeleteDuplicates

{Missing["UnknownProperty", {"Country", 
   "ExternalBalance", {"CurrencyUnit" -> "Euros"}}]}

EntityValue[
  countryclass,
  EntityProperty["Country", 
   "ExternalBalance", {"CurrencyUnit" -> Quantity[1, "Euros"]}
   ]
  ] // DeleteDuplicates

{Missing["UnknownProperty", {"Country", 
   "ExternalBalance", {"CurrencyUnit" -> Quantity[1, "Euros"]}}]}

Sometimes you can figure out how these properties work with Ctrl+=, which is how I figured out how to do this:

EntityValue[
 countryclass,
 EntityProperty["Country", 
  "ExternalBalance", {"PercentOfGDP" -> "PercentOfGDP"}
  ]
 ]

{Quantity[0.703882, "Percent"], Quantity[7.0582, "Percent"], 
 Quantity[4.48768, "Percent"], Quantity[-6.47908, "Percent"], 
 Quantity[0.459015, "Percent"], Quantity[7.57397, "Percent"], 
 Missing["NotAvailable"], Quantity[4.11505, "Percent"], 
 Quantity[32.1342, "Percent"], Missing["NotAvailable"], 
 Missing["NotAvailable"], Quantity[-1.32907, "Percent"], 
 Quantity[2.01432, "Percent"], Quantity[36.0466, "Percent"], 
 Quantity[11.6811, "Percent"], Quantity[2.42052, "Percent"], 
 Quantity[3.99459, "Percent"], Missing["NotAvailable"], 
 Quantity[4.20712, "Percent"], Quantity[-1.40457, "Percent"]}

Another very interesting place where I do know how this works is for the "WolframLanguageSymbol" property "Ranks" and its qualifier "Corpus":

EntityValue[
  EntityClass["WolframLanguageSymbol", "Atomic"],
  EntityProperty["WolframLanguageSymbol", 
   "Ranks", {"Corpus" -> "StackExchange"}],
  "Association"
  ] // TakeSmallest[5]

<|Entity["WolframLanguageSymbol", "Integer"] -> 75, 
 Entity["WolframLanguageSymbol", "Association"] -> 104, 
 Entity["WolframLanguageSymbol", "Real"] -> 142, 
 Entity["WolframLanguageSymbol", "String"] -> 145, 
 Entity["WolframLanguageSymbol", "Image"] -> 182|>