Retire the Label Unstructured Data
March 27, 2013
Grant Ingersoll, CTO of LucidWorks, is sick and tired of the term “unstructured data.” It is really hard to blame him. The term is everywhere these days, and tends to sum up an idea of any data that is hard for a traditional database to capture.
Ingersoll says:
“I think that, in the early days of databases, someone coined ‘unstructured’ as a derogatory term to mean ‘all the stuff a database isn’t good at working on.’ If ‘structured’ is good, then ‘un’-structured must be bad, right? The problem is that working with text is one of the defining computational challenges of our time. We need our best and brightest working on it; and not just so we can better target ads to consumers. It’s too full of promise to describe with such a diminutive word as ‘unstructured.’ Numerical data? Child’s play! Text? Now there’s a real challenge.”
Ingersoll goes on to say that “rich data” is his new phrase of choice. If unstructured is meant to be negative, and text is some of the most challenging, but most rewarding content we have available, then rich may very well fit the bill. Regardless, end users are looking for solutions to tackle their individual content storage and retrieval problems. LucidWorks, the company that Ingersoll helped found, does just that. So unstructured or rich, LucidWorks has the solution to meet your data needs.
Emily Rae Aldridge, March 27, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
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