Unstructured Data - Dealing With Unstructured Data

Dealing With Unstructured Data

Techniques such as data mining and text analytics and noisy-text analytics provide different methods to find patterns in, or otherwise interpret, this information. Common techniques for structuring text usually involve manual tagging with metadata or Part-of-speech tagging for further text mining-based structuring. UIMA provides a common framework for processing this information to extract meaning and create structured data about the information.

Software that creates machine-processable structure exploits the linguistic, auditory, and visual structure inherent in all forms of human communication. Algorithms can infer this inherent structure from text, for instance, by examining word morphology, sentence syntax, and other small- and large-scale patterns. Unstructured information can then be enriched and tagged to address ambiguities and relevancy-based techniques then used to facilitate search and discovery. Examples of "unstructured data" may include books, journals, documents, metadata, health records, audio, video, analog data, files, and unstructured text such as the body of an e-mail message, Web page, or word-processor document. While the main content being conveyed does not have a defined structure, it generally comes packaged in objects (e.g. in files or documents, ...) that themselves have structure and are thus a mix of structured and unstructured data, but collectively this is still referred to as "unstructured data". For example, an HTML web page is tagged, but HTML mark-up typically serves solely for rendering. It does not capture the meaning or function of tagged elements in ways that support automated processing of the information content of the page. XHTML tagging does allow machine processing of elements, although it typically does not capture or convey the semantic meaning of tagged terms.

Since unstructured data commonly occurs in electronic documents, the use of a content or document management system which can categorize entire documents is often preferred over data transfer and manipulation from within the documents. Document management thus provides the means to convey structure onto document collections.