Overview

A VIVO/Vitro instance can be customized to exclude a class of individuals from the search index.  All instances of a class can be excluded from the search index by adding a vitroDisplay:excludeClass property between vitroDisplay:SearchIndex and the URI of the class that you would like to exclude. This will have the effect of not displaying any individual with this class in search results, on the index page, in browse pages and as options for entry in some forms. The search exclusions are controlled by RDF statements in the display model.

Steps to create a new search exclusion

1. Create a file with your new exclusion
2. In your deploy directories, place that file in either vivo/rdf/display/everytime or vitro/webapp/rdf/display/everytime 
3. Stop Tomcat, deploy, and restart Tomcat
4. Login to VIVO as an admin and rebuild the search index.

Example on the contents of an RDF file to define exclusions

@prefix vitroDisplay: <http://vitro.mannlib.cornell.edu/ontologies/display/1.1#> .

vitroDisplay:SearchIndex 
    vitroDisplay:excludeClass <http://example.org/ns/ex/Hat> .