EFO Index

The EFO index stores Lucene documents for Experimental Factor Ontology terms used by autocomplete and ontology browsing features.

It supports term search, synonym expansion, and hierarchy navigation. The index contains primary ontology terms, hierarchy relationships, and alternative term entries used for query expansion.

Main fields

Field Name	Type	Stored?	Indexed	Description	Notes
id	string	Yes	Yes	Unique identifier for the ontology node.	Used as the internal document identifier.
term	string	Yes	Yes	Primary ontology term label.	Main searchable term in the ontology index.
child	string	Yes	Yes	Child node identifiers.	Used for hierarchy expansion and navigation.
alt_term	string	Yes	Yes	Alternative term or synonym.	Stored as separate searchable entries for synonym lookup.
efo_id	string	Yes	Yes	EFO accession or URI for the ontology term.	Present for primary ontology nodes.
parent	string	Yes	Yes	Parent node identifiers.	Used to represent the ontology hierarchy.
qe.term	string	Yes	Yes	Query-expansion term field.	Supports autocomplete expansion behavior.
qe.efo	string	Yes	Yes	Query-expansion EFO field.	Supports ontology-based query expansion workflows.

Notes

• The EFO index is built from ontology data rather than submission metadata.
• Primary term documents store hierarchy relationships such as parents and children.
• Alternative terms are indexed as separate documents to improve synonym matching.
• The index is used by autocomplete and tree-navigation features.
• Indexed values are normalized to support consistent search behavior.