Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

June 22, 2010

Unstructured Data or Unmapped Data?

Filed under: Data Mining,Marketing — Patrick Durusau @ 10:55 am

The Wikipedia article on unstructured data makes it clear that data may have a structure, but that “unstructured data” means one not readily recognizable to a computer.

The term unstructured data bothers me because any text has a structure. If it didn’t, we would not be able to read it. It would just be a jumble of symbols. Oh, sorry. Apologies to any AI agents “reading” this post. But that is how traditional computers see a text, just a jumble of symbols.

When people view a text, they see structure, recognize subjects, etc. Moreover, different people can look at the same text and see different structures and/or subjects.

There are topic maps that are written to enforce a “correct” view of a body of data and those are certainly useful in many cases. Topic maps also support users identifying the structures and subjects they see in a text, along side identifications made by others.

The extent to which users view texts and leave trails as it were of the structures and subjects they identified in a text (or body of texts), those trails form maps that can be useful to others.

Think of it as tagging but with explicit subject identity. The relationships to a particular text, its author, and a variety of other details could be extracted automatically and with a minimum of effort on the part of the user. A topic map application could even suggest subjects or associations for a user to confirm based on their reading.

Suggest: unmapped data.

Captures both the sense of exploration as well as allowing for multiple mappings.

Thoughts?

No Comments

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.

Powered by WordPress