Comments on: Can we please stop saying “unstructured” data?

By: Grant

Grant — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 17:41:43 +0000

Mark Harwood,

(for some reason, I can’t reply inline to your last reply)

Excellent points. I think you are starting to already see a new wave of education happening around it with the rise of machine learning and search via dominant companies like Google, FB, etc. as well as the big data movement such that people are being forced to think in probabilistic terms more and more just to stay afloat in the sea of data.

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 15:38:42 +0000

I agree. The term “Unstructured” is inappropriate when you think about the data that is likely to be stored. However, when talking about the worst case scenarios of what *could* be stored the term fits exactly. In those fields it is overwhelmingly more often than not that the data needs to be handled as if there were no structure at all. How many if these “Unstructured” fields are filtered by some sort of imposed NLP parsed data type after all? So we use that term to describe how we need to handle the field, not what the field may contain. However, when our free text data eventually becomes forced to be human readable then we will need a new term. I don’t mind “Rich Data” but the problem there is that there are many levels of more ir less structured data that could be considered rich. Today, instead of using the term “Unstructred” I prefer calling it “Unrestricted Data”. That describes both the way we should handle it and the potential content.

By: Mark Harwood

Mark Harwood — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 11:54:21 +0000

As we move away from the trusty database hammer and incorporate more of the unstructured with things like faceted search we create a fundamental usability problem – how do we satisfactorily explain that the beautifully structured results (pie charts, timelines, heatmaps) are all founded on some pretty fuzzy matching underneath (“more like this”, fallible synonyms etc)?
Database users are used to formal set logic (we either count something or we don’t) while search is more about fuzzy sets (things match to a degree).
Not seen a good answer to this question yet – or even general acknowledgement that it is a problem.

By: Grant

Grant — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 11:05:39 +0000

I sometimes use multi-structured as well, but it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.

By: Grant

Grant — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 11:03:43 +0000

Hi Mark,

I like the “greater freedom of expression” viewpoint and fully appreciate your view. In my view the word unstructured’s meaning depends on who it is using it. For people who, like you, embrace it, it probably is the simplest way (although rich data is pretty nice, IMO, too). Often times, though, I find people use it to mean all the other stuff that we don’t know how to handle very well using our big ol’ database hammer.

By: Craig

Craig — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 00:07:05 +0000

I agree with the headline, too many people do indeed refer to data in XML, JSON and the like as unstructured, but they are just as structured as the relational tuple model.

By: ksankar

ksankar — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 16:45:44 +0000

Multi-structured is a term that makes a lot of sense because there are many interpretations depending on the context. I am almost sure we will see ‘multi-structure’ will replace the ‘structure’ conference in a few years ;o)

By: JHLundin

JHLundin — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 15:37:40 +0000

…so, what cha gunna call it? …and how are you gunna to define it?

By: stevewooledge

stevewooledge — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 14:04:51 +0000

Some folks are using the term “multi-structured”. Most, if not all, data types have a structure or “format” of some kind. Being able to process/analyze them in as close to native format as possible has benefits.
Some thoughts:
http://www.asterdata.com/blog/2011/07/what-big-data-can-learn-from-the-pc-era-the-need-for-a-multi-structured-big-data-platform/

By: Joe

Joe — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 13:52:53 +0000

Structure is semantics, and all data has semantics in a given context, thus all data is structured.

If you don’t know what your data means and how to interpret it, game over. The terms are nice for marketing, but little more.