Bert Swope
Not long ago, the desire to use wildcards and to prevent false, empty results on the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) ATLAS Vocabulary Search page. Finding a wildcard that would world work took some research, as it is an undocumented feature of the ATALS search page. So, I thought I would document my findings in the hope they’ll be helpful.
The problem?
In a nutshell, the problem is that the search page dialogue does not like spaces. Therefore, you need a wildcard to search for a string or a partial string containing spaces on the ATLAS Vocabulary Search page.
Using the underscore (_) as a wildcard?
In the examples below, some variation on “Pacific Islander” is being used to discover known data values from the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP), Common Data Model (CDM) Vocabulary because the data contains value combined with a space or spaces in them.
Search for a value with a space in the middle
Substitute the space with an underscore(_):
Example ATLAS vocabulary search entry value
- Pacific_Islander
ATLAS vocabulary search results
Search for Seach for a partial value with a space in the middle
You can substitute the space in the middle with an underscore(_) and a few characters of the word:
Example ATLAS vocabulary search entry value
- Pacific_isl
ATLAS vocabulary search results
Search for a value with a string of spaces and words
Simply, substitute the space with an underscore(_) between each word:
Example ATLAS vocabulary search entry value
- Other_Pacific_Islander
ATLAS vocabulary search results
Search for a value word
To find a value containing a word, you can add an underscore(_) before and after your desired search word:
Example ATLAS vocabulary search entry value
- _Pacific_
ATLAS vocabulary search results
Search for a value of a partial word
To find a value containing a word, you can add an underscore(_) before and after your desired search word:
Example ATLAS vocabulary search entry value
- _isl_
ATLAS vocabulary search results
