How Data Extraction Can Help You Use Unstructured Data for Business Advantage

Not all data is produced equal. Data can exist in structured or unstructured formats, and even though structured data is much easier to analyze, unstructured data is far more common. According to International Data Corporation (IDC), 80% of worldwide data is expected to be unstructured by 2025. This presents a big challenge for companies, particularly those hoping to leverage PDFs and Excel files as a primary data source.

So, how can businesses take advantage of unstructured data? That’s where data extraction enters the scene. For example, Astera ReportMiner is a powerful data extraction tool that allows users to extract info from an extensive range of unstructured data sources. It uses template-based data extraction to help businesses leverage data confined within emails, PDF forms, spreadsheets, machine logs, and other unstructured data files.

What’s Unstructured Data?

Unstructured data doesn’t have a pre-defined format. It isn’t created in a manner that allows for customary relational organization. Unstructured data can’t logically reside in a tabular, row-column database. It can be considered as subjective information because the conventional queries or algorithms can’t easily search through, read, or analyze this kind of data.

Unstructured data files often include text and multimedia content. For example, email messages, word processing documents, videos, photos, audio files, presentations, etc.

What’s Data Extraction?

Data extraction is a process that involves retrieving data from several sources. Often, businesses extract data to process it further, transfer it to a data repository (like a data warehouse or a data lake) or to examine it further.

How Data Extraction Helps Derive Value from Unstructured Data

Unstructured data holds immense value when it comes to tackling issues and exploring prospects. Mining meaningful insights from unstructured data is tough as it encompasses intricate and laborious data analytics procedures. But with the help of advanced data extraction tools, this is changing quickly.

As unstructured data continues to flourish, companies are beginning to take advantage of these tools that can organize, manage, and automate the data extraction process. These tools include everything from built-in connectors and transformations, workflow automation, and more.

Many data extraction tools allow you to construct reusable extraction templates that can be used to extract meaningful info from all received documents with similar arrangements. You can easily create these extraction templates using code-free interface and automated name and address parsing features.

Wrap Up

Significant data can be extracted from any unstructured data source using data extraction tools. Yet, owing to the huge volume of data sources, the whole data extraction process becomes ungainly and the cost involved offsets the advantages. That’s where unstructured data extraction tools like Astera ReportMiner can help you easily automate the whole data extraction process and get valuable insights faster.