ConText is more powerful and flexible as part of the data base package instead of as stand-alone software, asserts retired U.S. Air Force major general Richard J. O'Lear, executive director for Oracle's advanced programs group. As independent software, it must be ported specifically to each user's type of machine. The Oracle7 data base already is ported to more than 90 platforms, making the search program available to a plethora of hardware systems. It is getting there incrementally as we work with more people and more different aspects of it. O'Lear notes that ConText provides meanings and thematic differences that narrow a large volume to a much smaller group of documents.
Intelligence analysts can collate useful information from diverse sources.
Users can place in priority order documents before they are read and provide summaries to determine if a document actually does meet information needs. John K. Allen, program manager with Oracle, echoes this point from an analyst's perspective. Text summarization becomes all the more valuable, he adds. The system currently comprises about 20,000 parsing rules with a lexicon of about 1 million words. These rules diagram a sentence and determine how each word acts, throwing away words that have no meaning or value.