Unstructured Data Item

An Unstructured Data Item is a data item without a data structure (its semantic properties are not explicit).

• Context:
  • It can (typically) be a Human Processable Artifact.
  • It can be a member of an Unstructured Data Item Set.
• Example(s):
  • a set of Audio Files.
  • a set of Image Files.
  • a set of Text Documents.
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • a Structured Data Object.
  • a Semi-Structured Data Item.
• See: Unstructured.

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References

2009

• (Wikipedia, 2009) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unstructured_data
  • Unstructured data (or unstructured information) refers to (usually) computerized information that either does not have a data model or has one that is not easily usable by a computer program. The term distinguishes such information from data stored in fielded form in databases or annotated (semantically tagged) in documents.
  • The term is imprecise: software that creates machine-processable structure exploits the linguistic, auditory, and visual structure that is inherent in all forms of human communication. [1] This inherent structure can be inferred from text, for instance, by examining word morphology, sentence syntax, and other small- and large-scale patterns. Examples of "unstructured data" may include audio, video, and unstructured text such as the body of an e-mail message, Web page, or word processor document.
• http://metacyc.org/MetaCycDefinitions.shtml
  • Unstructured Data. Data which is not structured (see definition for Structured Data, above), such as the free-text comments within MetaCyc. Those comments are not structured because the computer cannot automatically extract properties and relationships from the data.

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