what is unstructured data

Unstructured data is information that either does not have a pre-defined data model or is not organized in a pre-defined manner. It is typically text-heavy, but may contain data such as dates, numbers, and facts as well. Unstructured data has an internal structure, but it’s not predefined through data models. It might be human-generated, or machine-generated in a textual or a non-textual format. Examples of unstructured data include books, journals, documents, metadata, health records, audio, video, analog data, images, files, and unstructured text such as the body of an e-mail message, web page, or word-processor document. Unstructured data is usually stored in a non-relational database like Hadoop or NoSQL and processed using big data technologies like OpenText™ IDOL Unstructured Data Analytics to easily process large amounts of unstructured data.