Understanding unstructured data requires a data discovery exercise. Organisations must first ask themselves “What information have we got and where is it?” in order to understand where their information repositories are located and to gain a high-level understanding of the information contained within each, which may often be very approximate. The step requires obtaining an understanding of both the content and context of this information.
There are many tools available for searching and extracting content, but without context it may be difficult to quantify the risk or understand the value. Context can come from the surrounding metadata: for example, knowing that this subject was being discussed in a conversation between two people around a certain date. Context can also come from using natural language processing and smart analysis to understanding sentence construction (tools like IDOL can provide this).
This FAQ is in these categories: Unstructured Data