Introduction
With each passing second, the amount of data shared and transferred between humans grows exponentially. Organising, analysing, predicting, and making decisions based on such data is daunting. Companies today strive to understand the most recent market trends, customer preferences, and other requirements, which necessitates the interpretation of massive amounts of data as the main asset.
Big data is a collection of structured, semistructured, and unstructured data gathered by organisations that can be mined for information and used in machine learning, predictive modelling, and other advanced analytics initiatives. Big data processing and storage systems, as well as technologies that facilitate big data analytics, have become a regular component of data management architectures in businesses.
Unstructured Data
Unstructured data, as the name implies, is data that does not have a defined structure or format. Most of the information is in the form of unstructured data. The fundamental difference between structured and unstructured data is that the data structure is volatile in the latter.
Unstructured data contains information maintained internally, such as files, e-mails, and customer communication, as well as external information sources, such as tweets, blogs, YouTube videos, and satellite images, that are relevant to the firm. The amount and variety of this data are continually increasing. Companies are increasingly seeking to grasp the consequences of this plethora of data for their businesses today and in the future.
Documents, e-mails, texts, log files, tweets, and many more are unstructured data sources. While documents and e-mails may have some kind of structure, tweets and texts might contain slang and various abbreviations that make little to no sense. On the one hand, log files have a completely different type of structure associated with them.