Unstructured Information

As compute devices slide down in the economic scale, their use for not just specialist usecases but also in a genaralist sense increased.The growth in structured data can be loosely attributed to this pervasiveness of technology. Traditionally restricted to a small class of applications driven by a select group of users, structured data was soon employed by a myriad of applications.

Over time, as we now know, data stored on the most ubiquitiost of artifacts – the humble paper , was soon being captured and manipulated by software applications. Now a genaralist class of users were generating data which fell outside of the the boundries of well defined strucuted data. This unstructured data growing at a rapid rate – various analysts quote figures which read that 80% of information is in an unstructured form – was soon containing valuable, critical information. As a civilisation, we are dealing with rapid growth of unstructured information volumes beyond traditional capabilities.

Have we reached a tipping point? Im uncertain if we have … however the case is quite clear – all levels of our civilisation, from personal, government to corporations do need to consider their ‘information agenda’.

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