Unstructured information

Unstructured data (or unstructured information) refers to information that either does not have a pre-defined data model or is not organized in a pre-defined manner. Unstructured information is typically text-heavy, but may contain data such as dates, numbers, and facts as well. This results in irregularities and ambiguities that make it difficult to understand using traditional programs as compared to data stored in fielded form in databases or annotated (semantically tagged) in documents.

In 1998, Merrill Lynch cited a rule of thumb that somewhere around 80-90% of all potentially usable business information may originate in unstructured form. This rule of thumb is not based on primary or any quantitative research, but nonetheless is accepted by some.

IDC and EMC project that data will grow to 40 zettabytes by 2020, resulting in a 50-fold growth from the beginning of 2010. Computer World states that unstructured information might account for more than 70%–80% of all data in organizations.

The earliest research into business intelligence focused in on unstructured textual data, rather than numerical data. As early as 1958, CS researchers like H.P. Luhn were particularly concerned with the extraction and classification of unstructured text. However, only since the turn of the century has the technology caught up with the research interest. In 2004, the SAS Institute developed the SAS Text Miner, which uses SVD to reduce a hyper-dimensional textual space into smaller dimensions for significantly more efficient machine-analysis. The mathematical and technological advances sparked by machine textual analysis prompted a number of business to research applications, leading to the development of fields like sentiment analysis, voice of the customer mining, and call center optimization. The emergence of Big Data in the late 2000s led to a heightened interest in the applications of unstructured data analytics in contemporary fields such as predictive analytics and root cause analysis.

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