Any way to search descriptors by label and order by relevance?

[stefandesu]

Hi,

I've started using MeSH for our project (https://github.com/gbv/cocoda) and so far it's working great! Part of it is searching for a descriptor by label. Currently I'm using SPARQL with a regex filter; I've also tried the /lookup/descriptor endpoint. However, as far as I can see, neither allows me to order results by relevance. If I search for "infection" (to use the example given in the SPARQL editor), I would expect those descriptors where the label matches exactly or closely come first, then any other descriptors where the label includes "infection". That is given neither with SPARQL nor with Lookup. With SPARQL, it seems that the result order isn't even stable if I don't specify ORDER BY.

Is there any way to get search results ordered by relevant? Or do I need to request lots of results and do my own relevance sorting?

Thanks a lot!
Stefan

[danizen]

Not at this time, but we will discuss internally and get back to you. There is a development target to enhance the lookup API, and relevance would be a good addition. However, we have to decide if we have time to add relevance. It doesn't fit well with SPARQL but the lookup API doesn't need to be implemented with SPARQL.