Sunday, January 22, 2017

Oracle technologies used to analyze the Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States



The Oracle Database ships with a wonderful technology called Oracle Text.  Most people associate Oracle Text with the mere ability to index documents or data, perform text or phrase queries and get the results back.  But Oracle Text can do so much more.  One of the more interesting features of Oracle Text is the ability to analyze a document and generate a list of themes for the document along with a weight associated with that theme.

Back in 2004, in the era of Oracle HTML DB, Jason Straub on the Application Express development team wrote a demonstration application named Presidential Inaugural Addresses, which used both Oracle HTML DB and Oracle Text.  This application actually shipped with Oracle HTML DB for a time.  This was a fascinating application, which enabled you to view all of the Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States, identify the top themes associated with those addresses, and even identify which past presidents delivered addresses that had similar dominant themes.

This demonstration application stopped shipping with Oracle Application Express in 2006.  But I thought it might be interesting to dust off this application and improve the UI using Oracle Application Express 5.1.  So that's how I spent this past weekend (let the good times roll).  Using the existing data structures, I was able to create a new Universal-theme based application which turned out pretty elegant.

Please understand - this application and everything associated with it is not a political statement.  Given the relevance of this data at the time of this writing, I simply thought it would be a fascinating way to demonstrate insights into this information, using the Oracle Database, Oracle Application Express, Oracle Text and Oracle JET!

You can run this application HERE.

12 comments:

Juergen Schuster said...

Can we put a black ribbon to one of the cards? It's not a political statement I'm just wondering if it is working :-D

Rich Soule said...

Joel, what was the reason this stopped shipping? It was (and now is again) awesome!

It would be cool to add a search that would allow us to look for a theme. For instance search for 'war'.

Any chance of providing an export? 😀

Joel R. Kallman said...

Hi Rich,

Thanks for your comments. I forget all the reasons why it stopped shipping, but I'm sure most of the global APEX audience doesn't care too much about historical addresses from American presidents.

I'll work on adding the search capability. And I'd gladly provide an export, it's a pretty simple data model with not much data. You know how to get hold of me. ;)

Joel

Jochen said...

Very nice demo application!
After reading your blog entry i wondered if "adress" meant where they acutally lived in the US.. LEO Translation helped here.

And yes non-americans do care about American presidents too ;)

abulfeeed said...

Excellent. I've been researching capabilities that combine Oracle text and APEX. I would be very appreciative if I can receive a copy of this application so i can install it and learn from it

thank you for sharing

Joel R. Kallman said...

Rich,

Theme Search has been added. Let me know what you think.

Joel

abulfeeed said...

This is truly fascinating and opens up a world of possibilities

Stew said...

Joel,

Thanks for the Theme Search feature. I found it fascinating.

Unknown said...

Beautiful app!

I have been working a lot with Oracle Text through APEX interface. it is a magnificent way to approach google like search
I certainly would like to take a look on the script as well.



Matt McGee said...

Hey Joel, I understand there is an actual presentation on this application at some conference. Do you have a link to that by chance?

Thanks,
Matt

Joel R. Kallman said...

Hi Matt,

In fact, there is *NOT* a presentation on this application. But if you promise to come to ODTUG KScope17 in a month, I'll commit to present this to you in person!

Joel

Matt McGee said...

Joel,

I am registered and will be there in just a few weeks. I am up in the Fort Worth region.

Looking forward to it and hope it wont conflict with anything else.

Matt