Hi, I'm Cable o'dell, a member of the Taxonomy Ontology and Natural language processing team helping to define and design ontology and information architecture processes for E services. Today, we'll be talking about two major divisions of data, structured data and unstructured data. While it may be obvious that the difference between them is structure.
What does that mean? Structure literally means the arrangement of and relations between the parts or elements of something complex to structure data is to relate it to things that are known. Most structured data is stored in a database. If you're not familiar with databases, conceptually, they work like a table, you have rows of data. Each row is about a different thing to be described and columns, a description of that thing.
This is an example of structured data about customers. Each row represents a different customer and each column is a fact we wanna know about customers. Not every column needs to have a fact but a fact only goes in its correct location. Structured data in the end is exactly what it sounds like information placed in the structure. The structure makes it both easier to find the data and store information more efficiently. The important part is the data is organized to support finding the facts. You need unstructured data intuitively is the opposite.
It's information not stored in a way to make it findable. If you find a slip of paper with a string of numbers on it, that's unstructured. You have no context to understand the data. It could be a phone number, a part number, a price or a random string of numbers. It's impossible to know without more information. However, unstructured data isn't limited to singular facts. Most written content like word documents, emails and texts are unstructured data. They contain information that someone cared enough about to capture.
But the information is not readily accessible to understand what each document is about. Someone must read it. It may be helpful to describe what structured data is to help better understand what structured data is not. Structured data is clearly defined and searchable unstructured data is stored in its native format. Structured data is quantitative unstructured data is qualitative. Structured data is stored in data warehouses.
Unstructured data is stored in data lakes. Structured data is easy to search and analyze unstructured data requires more work to process and understand. Structured data exists in predefined formats. While unstructured data is stored in a number of formats. Structured data is information stored in a database or data warehouse or other organized location where data is identified by labels and definitions.
Unstructured data is in a book, email document or other location. In both cases, they contain data. But the greater the degree of structure, the easier it is to retrieve a piece of information in the end structure helps us to find and use the information we need with consistency and efficiency.
Thank you for taking your time to learn a bit more on this topic.