Sources of unstructured data

Data analytics has come very far since the spreadsheets and the BI tools in the eighties and nineties. Tremendous improvements in computing power, sophisticated algorithms, and an open source culture fueled unprecedented growth in data analytics, as well as in other fields. These advances in technologies paved the way for new opportunities and new challenges. Businesses started looking at generating insights from hitherto impossible to handle data sources such as internal memos, emails, customer satisfaction surveys, and the like. Data analytics now encompass this unstructured, usually text based data along with traditional rows and columns of data. Between the highly structured data stored in RDBMS table and completely unstructured plain text, we have semi-structured data sources in NoSQL data stores, XML or JSON documents, and graph or network data sources. As per current estimates, unstructured data forms about 80 percent of enterprise data and is growing...