Oracle Corp is so excited about a new product just out called Oracle ConText that it quite forgets to say what it runs on and how much it costs: called Oracle ConText, it is designed to automate text search, synopsis and content analysis of written information and has a vast 600,000 word dictionary with up to 1,000 pieces of linguistic data on each word; the company claims it can automatically analyse, summarise, route and file text data, probing the grammatical structure of each sentence in a document, reviewing each word or phrase to determine its importance to the overall document, so that it can identify the strongest overall themes using grammar and meaning rather than simple word frequency; it can then be set to do a summary; Oracle says it would like to see it embedded in on-line services such as Prodigy or America OnLine, filtering by topic the streams of textual data they provide, and that pricing of the product, which took 100 man-years to develop, would have to be negotiated on an individual basis.
