The application provides a data catalogue independent implementation retrieval and processing of ontologies from an external source. Currently, only the PaNET ontology is implemented. Below is a schematic data flow depicting the role of the pan-ontologies-api.

The pan-ontologies-API is a RESTful service that links the ontologies - currently only the PaNET ontology - to the search-API. At a high level, the service works by pulling and caching information from external ontology repositories, and in particular, the GET /techniques/pan-ontology endpoint translates the query from the user input (e.g. in the PaN portal) to a new query sent to the search-API, having added the logic from the PaNET ontology. In PaNET, we want to expand the query from the user, when looking for a particular technique, to include all the techniques which descend from it, namely the techniques which are different specifications of the same input class.