Oracle Context Option QuickStart

CHAPTER 1. Introduction

What is Oracle ConText Option?
What is QuickStart?
QuickStart Requirements

This chapter introduces Oracle ConText Option and QuickStart, and describes the requirements for setting up your system to enable ConText Option to store and retrieve text.

The following topics are covered in this chapter:

What is Oracle ConText Option?

What is QuickStart?

QuickStart Requirements

What is Oracle ConText Option?

Oracle ConText Option is an option to Oracle, providing powerful search, retrieval, and viewing capabilities for text stored in an Oracle database. These capabilities are implemented in Oracle using ConText server processes that complement the Oracle server processes and ConText indexes for each database column in which text is stored.

With ConText Option, you can use SQL and PL/SQL, Oracle's procedural extension to SQL, to incorporate advanced text and linguistic functionality into new or existing applications:

Text Processing

ConText Option provides advanced text searching and viewing functionality, such as full text queries, relevance ranking, and query term highlighting.

Text queries support a wide range of search options, including: logical operators (AND, OR, NOT, etc.), proximity searching, thesaural expansions, and stored queries.

Text viewing capabilities include WYSIWIG and plain text viewing of selected documents, as well as highlighting of query terms.

Note: Text viewing is not covered in this manual. For complete details about text viewing, see Oracle ConText Option Application Developer's Guide.

Linguistic Processing

If your documents consist of English-language text, ConText Option provides in-depth linguistic analysis of your text. The output from this linguistic processing can be used for performing theme queries, which retrieve documents based on the main topics and concepts found in the documents.

Note: Theme queries are performed in the same way as text queries and support many of the same search options.

In addition, ConText Option provides linguistic processing for individual documents in the form of Linguistic Services. The Linguistic Services produce output which can be used to create advanced text viewing capabilities in the form of theme lists and text summaries called Gists.

What is QuickStart?

Before text and theme query functionality can be integrated into an application, the database columns used to store text must be defined as text columns and text/theme indexes must be created for the columns.

In addition, if you want to incorporate theme lists and Gists into your English-language text applications, the Linguistic Services must be called to generate linguistic output for your text and the output must be stored in database tables.

QuickStart provides step-by-step instructions for quickly and easily performing these tasks. Once the QuickStart tasks have been performed, your system is text-enabled for queries and viewing.

QuickStart also provides examples of text and theme queries, as well as examples of queries that use the output generated by the Linguistic Services in ConText Option.

QuickStart Requirements

Before you can perform QuickStart, ConText Option must be installed and certain implementation tasks must be completed. In addition, QuickStart is easiest to perform when text is already stored in the database.

If the required installation and implementation tasks have not been completed, see "Implementing ConText Option (Chapter 4)."

ConText Option Defaults

QuickStart assumes the following conditions for your text and uses the appropriate defaults in ConText Option:

non-pictorial language (i.e. English or other supported European languages)

unformatted, plain (ASCII) text

text stored directly in database columns

each document stored as a single row

If these conditions are not valid for your setup, QuickStart can still be performed; however, you cannot use the defaults in ConText Option and must specify settings that match your setup.

Additional Information:
Oracle ConText Option Administrator's Guide

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