Results sorting request: exact matches to top

[Darren A Natale]

Hi Oliver and team,

Currently, Ontobee seems to have a rather inscrutable mechanism for returning results. Possibly it is just an unsorted list? In any case, it would be extremely useful to return results so that terms consisting of the standalone word 'WORD' are floated to the top, then list terms like 'WORD followed by a whitespace at the beginning of a term label', then 'WORD followed by a non-whitespace non-alphanumeric character at the beginning of a term label', then 'WORD followed by an alphanumeric character at the beginning of a term label', then 'term label containing WORD surrounded by whitespace somewhere after the beginning of the label', and finally 'term label containing someWORDpart anywhere within the label'. Within at least the first four groups it would additionally be useful to order the results alphanumerically.

To use a more concrete example:
'RNA'
'RNA molecule'
'RNA-binding protein 44'
'RNA15'
'coding RNA molecule'
'alternative allele of SNP'

I confess that this won't be the best example because, oddly enough, the single term 'RNA' doesn't appear in the results at all, even though there is definitely a still-active term in SO.

Even if doing all that is too time-consuming, just implementing the first one would be a very huge step forward and would likely solve most issues.

Best regards,
Darren

[He, Oliver]

Hi Darren,

 

Thanks for your wonderful suggestion!

 

Here I would like to assign this task to Leo, a software engineer in my lab.

Leo:

Let’s discuss this later and see if we can do as suggested by Darren.

 

Best,

Oliver

 

 

From: ontobee...@googlegroups.com <ontobee...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Darren A Natale
Sent: Wednesday, August 6, 2025 5:00 PM
To: ontobee...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Results sorting request: exact matches to top

 

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[Darren Natale]

Thanks Oliver and Leo!