How to Extract Structured Data Insights From Unstructured Data?

Unstructured Data Extraction

The increase in digitization of information, mixed with multiple transactions has resulted in a flood of data. The consistent increase in the speed of digital information has led the global data to double in very short time intervals. As per Gartner, around 80% of data with organization is unstructured data, which is comprised of data from emails, social media feeds and customer calls. This is in addition to information logged by the user devices. While it would be frightening to even make an appropriate analysis from organized data, it is even tough to make proper sense of this unstructured data.

Unstructured Data Analysis Information Extraction

Analyze semi- structured and unstructured data sets for improved business decisions

As an outcome, organizations have to analyze semi- structured and unstructured data sets to extract structured data insights to make improved business decisions. These decisions include shaping customer sentiment, finding customer needs and identifying the offerings that will relate more to the customer requirements.

While filtering big amounts of data can look like a tedious work, there are benefits. By analyzing large data sets of unstructured data, you can categorize connections from unconnected data sources and find specific patterns. And this analysis enables the discovery of business as well market trends.

Unstructured to Structured Data Conversion

There are seven steps to analyze unstructured data to extract structured data insights as below

First analyze the data sources

Before you can initiate, you need to analyze what sources of data are essential for the data analysis. Unstructured data sources are in found in different forms like web pages, video files, audio files, text documents, customer emails, chats and more. You should analyze and use only those unstructured data sources that are completely relevant.

1. Know what will be done with the results of the analysis

If the end result is not clearer, the analysis may be unusable. It is key to better understand what sort of outcome is required, is it a trend, effect, cause, quantity or something else which is needed. There should be clear road-map defined for what would be done with the final results to use them better for the business, market or other organization related gains.

2. Decide the technology for data intake and storage as per business needs

Though the unstructured data will come from different sources, the outcomes of the analysis must be injected in a technology stack so that the outcomes can be straightforwardly used. Features that are important for selecting the data retrieval and storage totally depends on the volume, scalability, velocity and variety of requirements. A prospective technology stack should be well assessed against the concluding requirements, after which the data architecture of the whole project is set-up.

Certain examples of business needs and the selection of the technology stack are:

Real-time: It has turned very critical for E commerce companies to offer real-time prices. This requires monitoring and tracking real- time competitor activities, and offering offerings based on the instant results of an analytics software. Such pricing technologies includes competitor price monitoring software.

Higher availability: This is vital for ingesting unstructured data and information from social media platforms. The used technology platform should make sure that there is no loss of data in real- time. It is a better idea to hold information intake as a data redundancy plan.

Support Multi-tenancy: Another important element is the capability to isolate data from diverse user groups. Effective Data intelligence solutions should natively back multi- tenancy positions. The isolation of data is significant as per the sensitivities involved with customer data and feedbacks combined with the important insights, to meet the confidentiality requirements.

3. Keep the information stored in a data warehouse till the end

Information should be well stored in its native format until it is really estimated beneficial and required for a precise purpose, maintaining storage of meta-data or other information that might help in the analysis if not now but later.

4. Formulate data for the storage

While maintaining the original data files, if you require to enable utilization of data, the best option is to clean one of the copies. It is always better to cleanse whitespaces and the symbols, while transforming text. The duplicate results should be detached and the out of topic data or information should be well removed from the data-sets.

5. Understand the data patterns and text flow

By using semantic analysis and natural language processing, you can use Parts- of- Speech tagging to fetch entities which are common, like “person”, “location”, “company” and their internal relationships. By doing this, you can build a term frequency matrix to better understand the data patterns and the text flow.

6. Text mining and Data extraction

Once the database has been shaped, the data must be categorized and properly segmented. The data intelligence tools can be utilized to search similarities in customer behavior when targeted for a particular campaign or classification. The outlook of customers can be resolute using sentiment analysis of feedbacks and the reviews, which assists in better understanding the product recommendations, market trends and offer guidance for new products or services launch.

You can utilize Social Media Intelligence Solutions to extract the posts or the events that customers and prospects are sharing through social media, forums and other platforms to improve your product and services.

7. Implement and Influence project measurement

The end results matter the most, whatever it might be. It is vital that the results are provided in a required format, extracting and offering structured data insights from unstructured data.

This should be handled through a web data extraction software and a data intelligence tool, so that the user can execute the required actions on a real-time basis.

The ultimate step would be to measure the effect with the required ROI by revenue, process effectiveness and business improvements.

Conclusion

The actual value can be derived when structured, semi- structured and unstructured data analysis is combined for a 360-degree outlook.

To know how you can mature your business outcomes utilizing DataCrops web data extraction solutions and data intelligence platform, connect for a free consultation with one of our experts today.

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How to Drive Business Growth by Extracting Intelligence from Unstructured Data?

Today unstructured data is generated across a multitude of organizations; this unstructured data is growing at a faster pace than the pace at which it is consumed. It is not possible for a human to manually surf through, understand insights and extract intelligence from unstructured data and communicate them across various channels. Computers can access and read through this data, however for computers, gathering data insights is not really possible.

Why unstructured data is a locked value!

All the information that is cluttered or scattered across files, and across platforms, is unstructured for a computer. This unstructured data can be present across emails, documents, files, on tweets, message boards, in forums, voice mails etc. to name a few. When valuable data is scattered across various mediums and across different platforms, it is a locked value, and cannot be utilized effectively to drive business growth.

Here is the information that can be unlocked by extracting or crawling relevant data insights from various platforms and presenting it in a structured analytical data format:

  • Data insights and information which businesses need for formulating strategies
  • Data to track market sentiment and competitor activities
  • Latest news updates that can have an impact on your business
  • Monitor customer behavior, opinions, requirements and grievances
  • Social media insights and intelligence to improve on social listening

How web data extraction and data intelligence solutions deal with unstructured data

Manual processing of unstructured data to extract insight does happen implicitly, however it is not scalable for huge data volumes. Web data extraction and data intelligence needs to be dealt with this productively to increase the value of this unstructured data.

Extracting data into a structured format helps bring ideas and resources together and interconnects people, practices, and customers to build knowledge. Information extraction from an unstructured data can be done for people, addresses, phone numbers, etc. to name a few. It can be also done to extract the relationships between entities, to gain insights into customer behaviour, to track competitor strategies, product prices, extract information about products, events and much more.

Why social listening is gaining momentum

Another common type of extraction is the one that encourages social listening; it can be done by collecting information about customer interactions, their reviews, sentiment analysis etc. Extracting all this information and making it structured, enables represent knowledge in the most assertive, understandable and analytical manner.

With Data Intelligence, you get answers to your questions like:

  • What products are the most popular and why?
  • Why are customers leaving us?
  • Why – a product that was once very popular, has reached its decline stage?
  • What is the value of a ‘tweet’, a ‘like’ or a share?
  • Are we providing the desired level or customer services or are our investments in this direction going waste?
  • What is the best price for my product?

How is data extracted from web?

Web data extraction is a process where data is crawled and relevant information is retrieved from data sources like social media portals, forums, e-commerce websites, from emails, blogs, business websites, product comparison portals and several such locations. The data processing activity that follows includes addition of Meta data and other data integration processes. Major portion of the extracted data comes from data formats such as tables, indexes, forms and analytics.

How Data Extraction meets Data Analytics and Intelligence

A combination of data extraction tools and technologies enable you to get data analytics and intelligence of the most useful information across platforms. When this unstructured data is collated, examined and presented in a visual manner to uncover the hidden patterns and unknown co-relations, it can be used to take informed and hence better decisions.

When an information platter is not just a plate full of information, but it makes sense to you, and you know what to do with this information, it empowers your organization with actionable knowledge, insight and finally intelligence.

Information extraction is not about data, it is about insight, intelligence and its impact and this is what drives business growth. The potential of big data, data extraction and analytics lies in its ability to solve problems pertaining to your business and hence expand your horizons, making scope for more business opportunities. In order to make the most of your data extraction software, that help your transform data into actionable insights, it is important to form your questions well and define what and from where data needs to be extracted.

Web Data Extraction and Intelligence Software

DataCrops is a robust software platform that automatedly extracts insights from numerous websites and multifaceted data sources using a powerful self-enhanced technology. It extracts data, transform, load it, and also converts this extracted data into intelligence which helps different businesses.

Key Takeaways

Now when your requirements are clear, it becomes easy to transform unstructured data into useful and directed information that gives you an intelligence to solve your targeted problems and take firm and informed business decisions.

To know how you can grow business using DataCrops web data extraction solutions and data intelligence platform, request a free consultation today with one of our experts.

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