Thinking about unstructured data

Posted by Sean Lew on Tuesday, 9 September, 2008 under Enterprise 2.0, Information management, social media |

My employer BearingPoint is a leader in information management (IM) and Mike 2.0 is a great example of our capabilities. We have completed a great projects around the world and has been viewed by many as leaders in this space. Being an enterprise 2.0 evangelist, I will ask myself, IM is great! Its addresses many different aspects of information within the organisation from strategy down to data migration. But that’s targeting your structured data through SQL, ETL and the 101 acronyms out there. What about unstructured data?

Enterprise 2.0 is about collaboration, social networking, innovation and so on. The end product of the whole company using a common platform to interact is a huge database of unstructured data. At the moment, there are some ways to mine this data and try to make sense of it. However, I wouldn’t call these methods productive nor efficient. This huge database of information which is currently untapped and understood at a higher level. There has been new technologies like natural language search and ideas like the semantic web which I hope would lay the foundation for the mining and understanding of large scale unstructured data better.

I do believe that this is the future of where the world is heading. We have now become extremely competent in managing large amounts of structured data, making it readily available and usable. The next area is to make unstructured data understandable and usable.

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