utilize ontology hierarchies in browsing features

[lwaldron]

The Uberon and Experimental Factor ontologies in use are hierarchical. It would be a powerful drill-down feature to be able to select terms at any level of the hierarchy, and display experiments/signatures matching any children of that term. For example, selecting oral cavity body site would return all the Uberon oral cavity subsites. Or selecting cancer would return experiments from all kinds of cancer in EFO.

[tosfos]

I have some ideas about it. And now that we have 28K+ values form Condition, we really should look at an alternative like this to make the Condition data set easier to process and use.

Besides for the hierarchy itself, it would be nice to use all of the data about the condition. I think we're essentially duplicating data that already exists by using the Glossary data structure. It would be nice to just use this external data instead.

[tosfos]

We have an idea for how to do this. We'd basically pull data on the fly from their API and use that to display a tree-style component that can be used for both storing the correct ontology value in the form and for later drilling down based on that same tree in order to find all Studies that have an experiment with that value.

This will take some time to get it right, but it will be a great site addition. Can we start with 10 hours of experimenting and seeing where that leaves us?

[lwaldron]

It's worth doing eventually, but we should probably do a budget review and prioritize essential items for public release first.