Dealing with Unstructured Data

A look at the value of unstructured data.  Worth a read.  Text is structured because cognitive beings created it.  But has structure that is driven by a number of influencing factors, that should have useful value.  Good read.  Good example.  Reminds me of our own experience in Content Analytics.

In CustomerThink: 
" ... What I want to focus on here is the nature of dealing with unstructured data. That’s where text analytics comes in. Text automation and analysis provides a way of harnessing unstructured information and incorporating it into insights and planning. I’ve been working with text for the last 12 years and have watched the field change a tremendous amount. In the earliest commercial offerings, text software was very time-consuming. It was heavily geared toward predictive modeling and typically used methods based on statistical and machine learning. Capabilities were far less robust for the most common analytic application today – survey verbatim classification through building taxonomies. (I remember working with one insurer whose team spent over 3,000 man hours building out text analytics just for categorizing claims notes). ... "