Oracle releases ConText 2.0
Oracle will next Monday release the latest version of its ConText text server, an add-on to its Universal Server.
Version 2.0 of ConText, an optional component of the company's Universal Server database first introduced last summer, adds new text searching functions that let users employ the Structured Query Language (SQL) to simultaneously search relational databases for both structured information, such as spreadsheet data, and unstructured data, such as text.
The company hopes the corporate world will use the add-on to build online help desks and to make Web site content more easily searched and indexed. For instance, ConText 2.0 can search beyond internal Oracle 7 database servers and reach the content of files located on the Internet. This means that users need only store URL pointers; when they active ConText, the software will go out to the Net and search and index the sites.
The company has also improved linguistic features so that ConText can refine searches beyond the keywords used by most Web search engines and deliver documents based on themes. As in previous releases, Version 2.0 of ConText can also determine the key paragraphs of a document and serve them up as summaries.
It also has native support for a variety of file formats including online standards ASCII, HTML, multimedia PDF files, and common word processing formats including Microsoft Word and Corel WordPerfect. Developers can also build their own filters for other document types, Oracle said.
ConText is being rolled out in English, but the company said it is developing versions for several European languages, plus Japanese and Korean.
Pricing starts at $495 per concurrent user, the company said.