By: aferrari

aferrari — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 22:05:42 +0000

Dan, Thanks for the comment. I absolutely agree that there’s a ton of value in enhancing unstructured information by adding more structure! And this can be accomplished in many ways – for example, like text analytics like entity and sentiment extraction, or more basic approaches like joining information from structured and unstructured sources together. In fact many of these techniques combine quite nicely – for example, in an enterprise setting I might pull customer and employee names out of unstructured text fields, and then join on structured data from my CRM or HR databases. But these approaches really work best with a semi-structured data representation as the target as opposed to a relational store. For example, if I’m doing entity extraction it’s hard to tell which types of entities I will find, and in what quantities. If I can pull structure out of unstructured information, there are many incredibly valuable user interaction features that we can power, like faceted navigation, type-ahead search, structured range filters (e.g., geographic filters if I can pull out location data), data visualizations like tag clouds, and so on. But we need to be targeting the right kind of data model when we take these approaches; otherwise they become limited by schema complexity and commensurate query evaluation slowdowns. -Adam

By: Dan Barbata

Dan Barbata — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 01:18:34 +0000

Is there any disadvantage you can see in trying to bring structure to unstructured information? By one way of thinking, the more structure you have the better. Wondering if you agree?

Comments on: Monash, are there really only three kinds of data?

By: aferrari

By: Dan Barbata