What is Unstructured Information?
Unstructured information is data that does not follow a predefined schema or format. Examples include text documents, emails, product reviews, images, audio, and video. Unlike structured data (tables, fields), it requires processing before indexing.
How It Works (quick)
- Text processing: Tokenization, stemming, semantic analysis.
- Media processing: OCR for images, ASR for audio, video transcription.
- Storage: Stored in flexible systems (NoSQL, object storage).
- Indexing: Converted into searchable features (keywords, embeddings).
Why It Matters in E-commerce
- Reviews: Free-text customer reviews hold valuable insights.
- Product content: Vendor descriptions, manuals, and PDFs are often unstructured.
- Media: Product images and videos need labeling or tagging for discovery.
Best Practices
- Use NLP/ML to extract meaning.
- Add metadata and tags for context.
- Standardize ingestion pipelines.
- Regularly retrain models for accuracy.
Summary
Unstructured information is raw content without a fixed schema. With processing, it becomes searchable and valuable for e-commerce discovery and analytics.
