Unstructured Information

a cross post from: http://fyzzi.wordpress.com/2010/07/10/unstructured-information/


As compute devices slide down in the economic scale, their use for not just specialist usecases but also in a genaralist sense increased.The growth in structured data can be loosely attributed to this pervasiveness of technology. Traditionally restricted to a small class of applications driven by a select group of users, structured data was soon employed by a myriad of applications.


Over time, as we now know, data stored on the most ubiquitiost of artifacts – the humble paper , was soon being captured and manipulated by software applications. Now a genaralist class of users were generating data which fell outside of the the boundries of well defined strucuted data. This unstructured data growing at a rapid rate – various analysts quote figures which read that 80% of information is in an unstructured form – was soon containing valuable, critical information. As a civilisation, we are dealing with rapid growth of unstructured information volumes beyond traditional capabilities. And more importantly, the information in its unstructured form contains valuable tacit knowledge that is highly valuable.

In many way to me, it becomes quite plain that at all levels of our civilisation (from personal, government to businesses) the information agenda is now that much more imperative!