Data is a gold mine of insights. It is important to have an integrated information architecture that facilitates better insights on multi-dimensional information to cater to business decision making and important events. The biggest question is, 'Where to start and how to find what's hidden in the data?'
It's believed that the average Practice Analyst and Data Scientist spends 70 to 80% of their time on data preparation, based on the events they think are important. There are different dimensions to the data. This data is funneled from different sources (internet /web data) that are added to the traditional sources making it complex. The more the dimensions it has, the more complex the data, making it hard to create sustainable business value.
Here are some examples of different dimensions of Unstructured Data:
- Data from corporate & personal email ids and social network profiles
- Text and instant messages
- Data generated from user activity on sites, such as location information
- Customer call logs and voicemail data
- Newspaper articles & whitepapers
- Encrypted files and images
- Images, audio and video files
- Calendar and contacts
- Internet browsing history
A smart technology can make things move smoothly with the right infrastructure in place. Enterprises are increasingly interested in accessing the unstructured information/data and integrating it with the structured data. Most of the platforms can identify maximum potential of the important variable followed by determining its relevance to the business. More precise data allows better test assumptions and easy identification of trends and provides higher confidence in analytic results. Here are the steps to gather the hidden facts:
- Collect relevant data from relevant sources.
- Get a powerful process in place to store the data.
- Run and determine the important variables.
- Develop a predictive model.
The future of information is not only the analysis of the volume of data but also the implementation of improved solutions that can allow all people across the organization to communicate and interact with the data, thus leading to the creation of an efficient, effective, productive and successful environment. The technology behind the process of analyzing unstructured data for useful insights is beginning to redefine the way organizations look at data and will significantly reduce the number of hours needed to gather the information. The files of unstructured data often contain a rich set of facts and dimensions which are otherwise not noticed due to lack of their visibility in a structured format. Therefore, it is required to tag and annotate the facts inherent in the text and its relative dimensions, so that the structures derived from it might be used for knowledge management and business intelligence.