SELECT * FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA

Question

The above select statement is supposed to help us get the schema information of all standard RDBMS . However, when i use this for Oracle, i get numbers, instead of data type keywords. Also, the numbers are sometimes the same for multiple datatypes, making ot difficult to decode the datatype of columns in a table. Does anybody have an idea of how to get the datatypes for Oracle using the above syntax, or any workarounds ? Thanks.