Building Oracle XML Applications

Advanced interMedia

This chapter covers only a small number of features available through interMedia Text. Just to whet your appetite, here are some of the broader text-searching features of interMedia not covered in this chapter:

More advanced features of the query language

The interMedia query language is extensive and supports Booleans, proximity, stem form expansion, wildcards, thesaurus operations, linguistic-based theme queries, relevance ranking and more. Most of these features can be used in conjunction with WITHIN for powerful XML searching. For instance, a stem form expansion query like:

$go WITHIN title

would find any of the following:

<TITLE>Go</TITLE>
<TITLE>Going Home</TITLE>
<TITLE>Gone With the Wind</TITLE>
<TITLE>The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill</TITLE>

Case-sensitive text and substring matching

Remember that when we contrasted the XPath contains() and the SQL CONTAINS earlier in this chapter, we noted that two aspects of XPath contains() were not mirrored in the SQL CONTAINS. Actually, with proper settings, interMedia can do case-sensitive text and substring searching; they just aren’t the default behavior.

Field sections and stop sections

These are different from the zone sections covered in this chapter. Field sections are useful for small, non-overlapping sections like header information. Field sections are more efficient than zone sections for WITHIN queries on large homogenous document sets. Stop sections are used for common XML elements that are not useful for WITHIN ...