How Do You Make Sense of Unstructured Data?

"Big Data" is getting so much attention because nearly everybody recognizes the value of structured and unstructured data that isn't being used in a formal way to advance an organization's goals. Most of the attention tends to be going to structured data, rather than unstructured data, a survey suggests.

About one in eight organisations fully exploits their its data while an even smaller fraction does so for unstructured data, the study by Freeform Dynamics surveyed 502 IT professional readers of The Register. 

That's no surprise. Up to this point, it has not been easy to "mine" unstructured data in a systematic way.