Search Space Setup - Considerations & Constraints

20/01/2026

Search spaces allow you to configure which data sources to search and how they relate to each other. You can define searches across knowledge graphs containing thesauri and custom schemes, RDF data, or tagged textual content.

This section outlines what should be considered prior to setting up a search space as well as how to handle any indexing errors caused by documents containing specific patterns commonly found in markdown links.

The pattern [text](identifier) is commonly used for links in markdown documents, but because it is reserved in Elasticsearch, you cannot use this syntax in content that will be indexed by Elasticsearch. Incompatible use of this syntax within documents, such as the text and title fields in the request body, can result in errors during indexing. For example, if you use the Content Create method, GraphSearch will return an internal server error because Elasticsearch rejects the index request for that text.

There are two cases in which this error occurs which can be detected by searching for their respective regex patterns and adjusting them before submitting them for indexing:

[<text>](<key>=<value>)
- Behavior: This pattern will be misinterpreted by the annotated text mapper plugin.
- Example Request:
```
{
    "searchSpaceId": "12345-abc",
    "identifier": "https://example-url.com/123",
    "title": "Example",
    "synchronize": false,
    "useExtraction": false,
    "author": "",
    "text": "Forbidden pattern: [Text](lhs=rhs)"
}
```
- Solution: It can be found via the regex \[([^]\[]*)]\(([^)(]*=[^)(]*)\) and the affected field or fields can be modified to adjust the clashing syntax.
[<text>](<*>%<*>)
- Behavior: If this pattern forms an invalid URL encoding it will be rejected. A valid URL encoding consists of a % sign followed by two or more characters that serve as a hexadecimal representation of that character. For example, "hello world" would be "hello%20world".
- Example Request:
```
{
    "searchSpaceId": "12345-abc",
    "identifier": "https://example-url.com/123",
    "title": "Example",
    "synchronize": false,
    "useExtraction": false,
    "author": "",
    "text": "Forbidden pattern: [Text](%A)"
}
```
- Solution: It can be found via the regex \[([^]\[]*)]\(([^)(]*%[^)(]*)\) and the affected field or fields can be modified to adjust the clashing syntax.

In this section: