Читать книгу Enterprise AI For Dummies - Zachary Jarvinen - Страница 27

Many more types of data are available than ever before. Traditionally, companies focused their attention on the data created in their corporate systems. This was mainly structured data — data that follows the same structure for each record and fits neatly into relational databases or spreadsheets.

Today, valuable information is locked up in a broad array of external sources, such as social media, mobile devices, and, increasingly, Internet of Things (IoT) devices and sensors. This data is largely unstructured: It does not conform to set formats in the way that structured data does. This includes blog posts, images, videos, and podcasts. Unstructured data is inherently richer, more ambiguous, and fluid with a broad range of meanings and uses, so it is much more difficult to capture and analyze.

A big-data analytics tool works with structured and unstructured data to reveal patterns and trends that would be impossible to do using the previous generation of data tools. Of the three Vs of big data, variety is increasingly costly to manage, especially for unstructured data sources.