Oracle Text Thesaurus Creation and Maintenance

If you have the CTXAPP role, you can create, modify, delete, import, and export thesauruses and thesaurus entries.

This section contains the following topics.

• CTX_THES Package: To maintain and browse your thesaurus programatically, you can use the CTX_THES PL/SQL package. With this package, you can browse terms and hierarchical relationships, add and delete terms, add and remove thesaurus relations, and import and export thesauruses in and out of the thesaurus tables.

• Thesaurus Operators: To expand query terms according to your loaded thesaurus, you can use the thesaurus operators in the CONTAINS clause. For example, use the SYN operator to expand a term such as dog to its synonyms:

  'syn(dog)'

• ctxload Utility: You can use the ctxload utility to load thesauruses from a plain-text file into the thesaurus tables, and to dump thesauruses from the tables into output (or dump) files.

  You can print the thesaurus dump files, you can use them as input for other applications, and you can use them to load a thesaurus into the thesaurus tables (useful when you want to use an existing thesaurus as the basis for a new thesaurus).

  WARNING: To ensure sound security practices, Oracle recommends that you enter the password for ctxload by using the interactive mode, which prompts you for the user password. Oracle strongly recommends that you do not enter a password on the command line.

Note:

You can also programatically import and export thesauruses in and out of the thesaurus tables using the PL/SQL package CTX_THES procedures IMPORT_THESAURUS and EXPORT_THESAURUS.

Refer to Oracle Text Reference for more information about these procedures.