Fullmap¶

Build a fullmap once and every resolve() / resolve_many() call maps free text to the right biological CURIE. How complete and how fresh this database is sets how many of your entities resolve and how trustworthy the resulting graph is.

Fullmap is Tablassert's embedded entity-resolution database: a small set of redb files containing biological synonyms, CURIEs, Biolink categories, taxon IDs, and source provenance, built from NCATS Translator BABEL export files. It comprises a primary file holding the dimensions, CURIEs, and schema metadata, plus hash-sharded RECORDS files (fullmap.s0.redb ... fullmap.s15.redb by default) holding the term-to-postings index.

Fullmap is built entirely in-process by Tablassert's own Rust extension: no external tool and no install step. When the optional [aria2] extra is installed (pip install "tablassert[aria2]"; Linux/Windows wheels only), both download stages use the bundled aria2c binary automatically; without it, Tablassert's Python downloader is used.

Build Command¶

# Default: download the prebuilt fullmap.tar.zst for this version and extract it (fast)
tablassert build-fullmap

# Force a from-scratch build from BABEL outputs (skips the prebuilt download)
tablassert build-fullmap --force

# Optional: with `pip install "tablassert[aria2]"`, the same command downloads through the bundled aria2c automatically
tablassert build-fullmap

The taxon allowlist is always on; there is no flag. Every database build-fullmap installs uses the checked-in src/tablassert/data/experimental_taxa.yaml list and filters non-OrganismTaxon synonym rows with valid taxon metadata before interning. Rows with no valid taxon metadata and every OrganismTaxon row are retained; a row with multiple taxa is kept when any taxon is allowlisted. The first taxon continues to be stored for existing hydration and lookup behavior. The built database records its allowlist identity in META.taxon_allowlist, and that identity gates both reuse paths:

A prebuilt archive whose recorded identity does not match the current allowlist fails validation during extraction, so it is never installed; the command falls back to a filtered source build. The operational consequence depends on what RENCI has published: if an archive for the requested version and allowlist exists it is used directly, and otherwise the default invocation downloads the closest published archive, fails the identity check, and then performs the full BABEL download and build.
A database already present at --output is reused only when its recorded identity matches; otherwise it is rebuilt.

See the build-fullmap CLI reference for the complete flag table (output path, cache directory, BABEL snapshot version, and the --force / -f rebuild flag), their defaults, and more examples.

By default, build-fullmap first downloads a prebuilt database published for this Tablassert version, a fullmap.tar.zst under .../fullmap/<tablassert-version>/ (the version directory is the installed package version, never hardcoded), verified against a co-published sha256sum.txt when that file is present and parseable (otherwise the download proceeds with a warning) and extracted beside --output entirely in the Rust extension: it streams the archive through zstd decompression and untars it (the multi-GB decompressed tar is never materialized on disk) with the GIL released, extracts into a temp directory on the output's filesystem, and, before renaming anything into place, validates the bundle against the same contract a --force build must satisfy: the meta schema tag is exactly tablassert.fullmap.v6, a build_id is recorded, the shard files are exactly the set the primary advertises (no gaps, no extras), every shard's build_id equals the primary's, and the primary's META.taxon_allowlist identity equals the one the built-in allowlist would record. Only a bundle that passes is atomically renamed into place (the primary to --output, shards beside it); any failure raises and the command falls back to the from-scratch build below. If no prebuilt is published for this version it falls back the same way; --force / -f skips the prebuilt attempt and always builds. When the optional [aria2] extra is installed, the bundled aria2c from that extra accelerates either download automatically, and the Python downloader is used otherwise.

Two facts matter most when planning a build:

The BABEL version flag (--babel-version, -v) selects a RENCI BABEL snapshot date (default 2026jul22), not Tablassert's package version. Bumping it fetches a different snapshot and requires rebuilding; the value used is recorded in the primary's meta table (source_version).
The build parallelizes automatically across all available CPU threads: the Rust build caps workers at min(available_CPUs, MemAvailable_GB / 2) on Linux (reading MemAvailable: from /proc/meminfo, each worker budgeting ~2 GB of local buffers) and falls back to ~90% of CPUs elsewhere, so a large build stays within a fixed memory budget. There is no flag to tune.

Data Pipeline¶

The build is a parallel, memory-bounded pipeline executed by the Rust extension:

Download: fetch BABEL class and synonym files from RENCI into the cache (resumable, reused). This uses Tablassert's Python downloader, or the bundled aria2c binary automatically when the [aria2] extra is installed, preserving aria2 resume control files across dropped downloads and failing loud on a non-zero aria2c exit instead of being silently rescued by the Python downloader.
Equivalents index: parse class files into sorted on-disk runs, then k-way merge them into a memory-mapped index mapping each primary CURIE to its equivalents.
Synonym pass: a producer/consumer pool streams byte-bounded line-chunks; workers dedup CURIEs, accumulate postings mapping each normalized term to its (CURIE, source) pairs, and spill per-shard runs to disk so peak RAM stays flat regardless of input size.
Write: one redb transaction writes the primary tables, then shard_count independent k-way merges write the shard records files in parallel (one thread per shard).

Pipeline details

Heavy intermediate state spills to a temporary directory (<output>.spill.d, removed on success) rather than RAM, so a full BABEL build (hundreds of millions of CURIEs) completes within a fixed memory budget; the mimalloc allocator keeps heavy multi-threaded allocation from bloating resident memory.

Download: files come from https://stars.renci.org/var/babel_outputs via resumable, range-request downloads; cached files are reused. When the [aria2] extra is installed, both this stage and the prebuilt archive download use the bundled aria2c binary, with aria2's segmented HTTP downloads and retry/resume control files while suppressing aria2's own progress UI so Tablassert's progress bar stays clean. The progress detail remains file-level (aria2c downloading) rather than byte-level in that mode.
Equivalents index: class files parse in parallel into sorted on-disk runs, k-way merged into a single memory-mapped CURIE-to-equivalents index; only a compact (hash, offset) index lives in RAM, the string data is mmap'd.
Synonym pass: uses intra-file parallelism: a small pool of producer threads decompresses/reads the synonym files and pushes byte-bounded line-chunks through a bounded channel, and every worker draws from one shared queue, so the few very large files (protein/smallmolecule/gene/drugchemicalconflated) are processed by all workers, not one thread each. Per row, the build collects dimension sets (CURIE prefixes, Biolink categories, sources), assigns compact integer CURIE IDs via a dedup map keyed on xxh3_128(curie), and accumulates postings mapping each normalized term to its (CURIE, source) pairs. Each worker drains its per-CURIE rows and term postings to bounded on-disk spill runs once its buffer fills, the term postings partitioned per-shard at spill time (each run_s{shard}_{run_id:08}.bin holds only terms with xxh64(term) & (shards-1) matching that shard), which keeps peak RAM flat regardless of input size and lets the write phase merge each shard independently. Dead terms (purely numeric, or generic labels like none/nan/null) are skipped, since they can never be queried.
Write: a single redb write transaction in the primary file emits the dimension tables (prefixes, categories, sources), the curies table (streamed from its spill runs), and the meta schema tag (recording the shard count). The records table is then written in parallel across the shard files: building on the per-shard spill partitioning, the write phase runs shard_count independent k-way merges, one thread per shard, each merging only its own shard's runs and inserting the merged term groups inline into that shard's redb file (one database per shard, since redb allows a single writer per file) in hash-sorted batches for near-sequential B-tree appends (each batch is appended through redb's end-of-table cursor API, the faster ascending bulk-load path; loading each shard in ascending key order also lets the engine pack its pages densely, so current builds write smaller shard files at the same schema). Because every term's postings already live in its own shard's runs, each merge groups a term completely with no cross-shard coordination, and one writer per shard keeps the merge+insert bottleneck off the critical path.

Build Tunables (environment)¶

Advanced tuning for the build's memory/speed trade-offs. Defaults are safe for a typical large build; override only when targeting an unusual machine.

Variable	Default	Description
`TABLASSERT_FULLMAP_EXCLUDE_PREFIXES`	(empty)	Comma-separated CURIE prefixes to drop at build time (e.g. `InChIKey`, `CAID`). Dropping prefixes you never resolve cuts build time, peak memory, and database size. InChIKey terms are retained unless excluded explicitly.
`TABLASSERT_FULLMAP_CHUNK_BYTES`	`8388608` (8 MiB)	Byte budget per producer-to-worker line-chunk. Bounded by bytes (not line count) so chunk memory is fixed even for large synonym records.
`TABLASSERT_FULLMAP_PRODUCERS`	`clamp(workers/4, 4, #files)`	Number of producer (decompressor) threads. Decompression far outpaces parallel processing, so a handful keeps all workers fed.
`TABLASSERT_FULLMAP_LOCAL_SPILL_ENTRIES`	`1000000`	Per-worker term-posting buffer size before spilling a sorted run to disk. Lower values use less RAM but produce more run files.
`TABLASSERT_FULLMAP_CURIE_SPILL_ENTRIES`	`250000`	Per-worker CURIE-row buffer size before spilling to disk. Lower values use less RAM but produce more run files.
`TABLASSERT_FULLMAP_EQUIV_SPILL_ENTRIES`	`2000000`	Per-thread equivalents buffer size before spilling during the equivalents-index build.
`TABLASSERT_FULLMAP_INSERT_BATCH`	`2000000`	Records buffered per hash-sorted batch during the redb write. Larger batches write faster but use modestly more RAM.
`TABLASSERT_FULLMAP_REDB_CACHE_BYTES`	`2147483648` (2 GiB)	redb write-cache size.
`TABLASSERT_FULLMAP_SPILL_DIR`	`<output>.spill.d`	Directory for intermediate spill runs (removed on success).

Output Artifact¶

A primary redb file (default ./fullmap/data/fullmap.redb) plus its sibling RECORDS shard files (fullmap.s0.redb ... fullmap.s15.redb, one per shard, named after the output file stem in the same directory). The shard count is fixed at 16 (the read path still honors the count recorded in an existing database's meta table). Together they hold six tables (see rust/src/fullmap.rs):

Table	Description
`records`	Normalized term (xxhash `u64`) mapped to a serialized list of resolution postings (CURIE id, source id). Hash-partitioned across the shard files (`fullmap.s0..s<N-1>.redb`) by `xxh64(term) & (shards-1)`; a term lives in exactly one shard.
`prefixes`	Maps a compact `u16` id to its CURIE prefix string (primary file)
`categories`	Maps a compact `u16` id to its Biolink category string (primary file)
`sources`	Maps a compact `u8` id to its source metadata (name/version) (primary file)
`curies`	Maps a compact `u32` id to its CURIE record (CURIE, preferred name, category, taxon, source) (primary file)
`meta`	Schema version tag (`tablassert.fullmap.v6`), the shard count (`shards`), the BABEL `source_version` used to build the file, and the allowlist identity (`taxon_allowlist`) recorded for every `build-fullmap` output; absent only in databases built unfiltered through the lower-level surfaces (the Rust API, or `build_fullmap_pipeline`'s `taxon_allowlist=None` default) (primary file)

The shard files must remain alongside the primary file: lookups discover them as siblings of the resolved primary path.

Lookups (lookup_fullmap_terms) check the primary's meta schema tag before reading records, read the shards count to open exactly that many shard files, and fan the query terms out across the shards in parallel (releasing the GIL, one reader per non-empty shard, re-merged into input order); a mismatched or missing tag raises rather than silently reading incompatible data. Databases built under the older v1/v2/v3/v4/v5 schemas are rejected: there is no automatic schema migration, so a schema bump (the v3 to v4 move to sharded files, the v4 to v5 move to the redb 4 engine, and the v5 to v6 move to normalized level-one keys) requires rebuilding via tablassert build-fullmap.

Readers open every fullmap file READ-ONLY with a SHARED file lock (redb 4 ReadOnlyDatabase), so any number of processes can run lookups against the same fullmap concurrently; only a build-fullmap rebuild (an exclusive-lock writer) briefly blocks readers. Each lookup pins one primary-plus-shards file generation, cached handles are validated against the file's (dev, ino) on every use, so a reader follows a rebuild on the next lookup.

Usage in Graph Config¶

The fullmap: field in a graph configuration points at either the redb file directly or a base directory. Tablassert resolves it via fullmap_db_path():

If the path is a file or already ends in .redb, it's used as-is.
Else if <path>/fullmap.redb exists, that's used.
Else it falls back to <path>/data/fullmap.redb (the build-fullmap default layout).

# graph-config.yaml
name: my-graph
version: "1.0"
fullmap: /path/to/fullmap/   # directory containing data/fullmap.redb, or a direct .redb file
tables:
  - ./TABLE/my-table.yaml
rig:
  source_info:
    infores_id: infores:my-graph
    terms_of_use_info:
      terms_of_use_url: https://example.org/terms
    data_access_locations:
      - My source downloads - https://example.org/downloads
    source_status: unknown
  ingest_info:
    utility: Example graph backed by a fullmap entity-resolution database.
    scope: Example scope for the graph.
  provenance_info:
    contributions:
      - "Author Name - code author"
  artifact_base_url: https://example.org/my-graph
  artifact_base_path: ./published/my-graph

Programmatic Usage¶

Pass the fullmap path (file or base directory) as the fullmap argument to resolve_many(); see Batch Resolution for the full reference and example, and Entity Resolution for the lower-level resolve() API.

Inspecting a Fullmap¶

tablassert quick-map TERMS... -f <fullmap> resolves one or more terms against a built database through the exact op chain a build runs per node column, printing one rich table per matched term with its ranked matches (CURIE, PREFERRED_NAME, CATEGORY_NAME, TAXON_ID, SOURCE_NAME, NLP_LEVEL, PR) and the normalized probe keys the term became. Its flags mirror the NodeEncoding config fields (--taxon, --prioritize, --avoid, --exclude-prefixes, --exclude-regex), so it reproduces any column's resolution settings; see the CLI reference. The Python-side core is fullmap.quick_map() (Entity Resolution).