ISO/IEC 13249:2003:

1. introduces the Full-Text part of ISO/IEC 13249 (all parts);
2. gives the references necessary for ISO/IEC 13249:2003;
3. defines notations and conventions specific to ISO/IEC 13249:2003;
4. defines concepts specific to ISO/IEC 13249:2003;
5. defines the full-text user-defined types and their associated routines.

The full-text user-defined types defined in ISO/IEC 13249:2003 adhere to the following.

• A full-text user-defined type is generic to text handling. It addresses the need to search and retrieve information based on aspects of full-text data using patterns such as words, phrases, proximity expansion, fuzzy expansion and thesaurus based expansions. It also addresses the need to construct such search patterns for text identification facilities and text ranking facilities.
• A full-text user-defined type does not redefine the database language SQL directly or in combination with another full-text data type.

An implementation of ISO/IEC 13249:2003 may exist in environments that also support information and content management, decision support, data mining and data warehousing systems.
Application areas addressed by implementations of ISO/IEC 13249:2003 include, but are not restricted to, library, newspaper, multimedia and scientific research applications.