How well do you know unstructured data?

Understanding Unstructured Data: Forms, Characteristics, Sources, Storage, and Extraction

• Digital data can be classified into three forms: unstructured, semi-structured, and structured.
• Unstructured data does not conform to a data model and makes extracting information from it difficult.
• 80-90% of business data is either unstructured or semi-structured, according to Merrill Lynch.
• Gartner estimates that unstructured data constitutes 80% of the whole enterprise data.
• Semi-structured data has some structure but is not in a form that can be easily used by a computer program.
• Structured data is in an organized form and can be easily used by a computer program.
• Unstructured data is not easily usable by a program, does not follow any rule or semantics, and has no easily identifiable structure.
• Unstructured data comes from web pages, memos, videos, images, body of an e-mail, word documents, PowerPoint presentations, chats, reports, whitepapers, and surveys.
• Unstructured data can be classified into two broad categories: bitmap objects and textual objects.
• HTML pages are considered unstructured data because the tagged elements do not capture the meaning of the data and they carry links and references to external unstructured content.
• Challenges in storing unstructured data include storage space, scalability, retrieving information, security, updating and deleting, indexing, and searching.
• Possible solutions for storing and extracting information from unstructured data include changing formats, new hardware, storing in relational databases which support BLOBs, storing in XML, and organizing files based on their metadata.

Take this quiz to test your knowledge on unstructured data, including its forms, characteristics, sources, storage, and extraction. Learn about the challenges of storing and retrieving information from unstructured data, and explore possible solutions for managing this type of digital data. Keywords: unstructured data, data model, semi-structured data, structured data, bitmap objects, textual objects, HTML pages, storage space, scalability, indexing, searching, metadata.