interMedia/ConText

Is anyone familiar with these packages? In oracle 8i, interMedia replaces ConText which was used in earlier versions.

From my understanding it's a package to perform queries on blocks of text, and return hits based on wether a specific word or group of words are contained, and can be sorted by their score of matching. Also in addition to simply containing the words, there is an operator to see if the text is "about" the subject being queried.

After reading of the documentation, it seems like I can only query while looking for a subject. For example, if I have a block of text, I don't know what it is about. However, if someone asks me if it's about databases, I can read it and say "yes this is about databases", or "no this isn't about databases", or some answer in between.

I'm curious if it's possible to take that block of text, and before anyone asks, find out what it is about. For example, take that previous block of text, parse it, and say "this is about databases" so topics can be queried upon. Obviously a lot of natural language processing is involved, I was wondering if the Oracle tools did this now, or only the process I described above. If interMedia doesn't do the processing to take a block of text and tell me what it's about (without asking specificially), does anyone know of any mid-high end commercial tools that will accomplish this?

Thanks for any info.

I am not aware of third party software to do that kind of analysis (I haven't had a need for it).

But you are correct, using the intermedia packages that are in Oracle now, the best you can get is a "yes im here", or "no im not".

thanks for the confirmation. anyone else know of any good natural language parsing tools? i suppose an application could be written with either method, it just seems more efficient to be able to parse the text once and just query off keywords, instead of parsing the text for every subject to see if it's good. i know there are some research projects which can do this type of processing but i don't think any of those would fly at work :)