
Oracle Text Thesaurus Administration Tool

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Copyright (C) Oracle Corporation 2001

Editor: Roman Schneider

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

1.0 Introduction

2.0 Installation

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1.0 Introduction
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The Oracle Text Thesaurus Administration Tool is a WWW-based solution for
managing one or more thesauri within the Oracle database. It simplifies this
task by offering an easily understandable web frontend that can be displayed
with any web browser, and frees the user from the need for manually typing
SQL commands.

Furthermore, this tool can be used for the administration of translations
or corresponding terms between different (monolingual) thesauri. It uses the
Oracle Text translation table to store information about such translations.
Once a translation is stored in this table, the frontend will display the
translated phrase, and offer a hyperlink to the other thesaurus. The frontend
can even deal with multiple translations and homographs.

When using the Oracle Text Thesaurus Administration Tool, the user can switch
between a hierarchical view and an alphabetical view. The hierarchical view
displays the top-level terms as the main entries of an expandable tree. The
alphabetical view shows one main entry for each term, with a list of all
stored relations and translations for this term.

Currently, the Oracle Text Thesaurus Administration Tool can be used to
fulfill the following tasks:

- creation of new thesauri
- deletion of existing thesauri
- creation of phrases and relations between them within a thesaurus
- manipulation and deletion of existing phrases and relations
- creation of one or more translations / corresponding terms in other
  thesauri for any existing phrase
- manipulation and deletion of existing translations / corresponding terms
- switching between translations / corresponding terms in different thesauri
- fulltext search within any thesaurus using standard Oracle SQL wildcards
- checking for potential problems before using ctxkbtc to compile a knowledge
  base out of the thesaurus
- checking for other unintentional phenomena, such as relation cycles

The Oracle Text Thesaurus Administration Tool comes as a set of PL/SQL Server
Pages (PSP). When called by a web-server with PL/SQL gateway, it operates
directly on the Oracle Text thesaurus tables (DR$THS, DR$THS_PHRASE,
DR$THS_BT, and DR$THS_FPHRASE). However, if these thesaurus tables are empty
(with none defined thesaurus), it will fail with error when you try to display 
the main page of the Oracle Text Thesaurus Administration Tool.

Though the tool should be usable without any special introduction, Oracle
recommends that the user should be familiar with the basics of thesaurus
administration, as outlined in the "Oracle Text Application Developer's Guide"
and the "Oracle Text Reference". All provided structures and functions are
based on the ISO-2788 and ANSI Z39.19 standards.


2.0 Installation

=================

In order to set up the Oracle Text Thesaurus Administration Tool, two separate
installation steps are required:

- Compilation of the PL/SQL package ctx_thesadm
- Configuration of a PL/SQL gateway for the web-server

a) Load a thesaurus into database with ctxload or create a thesaurus with CTX_THES 
   package, an sample thesaurus is availabe at $ORACLE_HOME/ctx/sample/thes 
   directoty.

b) Compile the package header specification (see ctx_thesadm_spec.pls) as well
   as the package body (see ctx_thesadm_body.pls) within the ctxsys database
   schema. If you do not know how to compile the package, or if you do not
   have the necessary permession, please ask your database administrator.

   For further information on compiling PL/SQL packages, see the "Oracle
   Application Developer's Guide".
   
c) Configure your web-server so that it can access the PL/SQL package. When
   using the Oracle HTTP Server (provided with Oracle 8.1.7 and above), this
   is done by configuring the mod_plsql gateway. If not already provided, add
   a Database Access Descriptor (DAD) for the ctxsys database schema. Make
   sure that you enter the proper username, password, and connect string for
   the new DAD.
   
   You may decide to protect the gateway against unauthorized use. To do so,
   you can enable different authentication modes using the Authentication Mode
   parameter on the PL/SQL gateway configuration page.
   
   For further information on configuring the Oracle web-server, see the
   "Oracle Internet Application Server Using the PL/SQL Gateway" documentation.
