Standardize Your Unstructured Data With Standard Data

Hi again, data-loving friends,

Ever wonder what makes data visualization and analysis simple? The answer is structured data.

But, more often than not, we find ourselves combing through volumes and volumes of unstructured data on behalf of organizations large and small. So, what's the difference and how do you know if you're dealing with structured or unstructured data?

• Structured Data: is clean and includes easily searchable patterns across data fields due to like categorical records — think zip codes, phone numbers, SSNs or real-world applications such as reservation systems, inventory management, transactions, etc.
• Unstructured Data:  is not easily searchable and is incongruent across datasets — think emails, texts, photos, chat messages, CRM notes, serial PDF reports, etc.

Still confused? Let’s break it down this way: imagine scrolling through your text messages and trying to deduce patterns (or any categorical information from them). This is time consuming and headache inducing because each text entry is unique — unstructured — and like commonalities among each text are few and far between. On the contrary, your contact list is uniform: name, phone number, email address, etc. — these fields are structured. Finding patterns within a contact list is a much simpler process than combing through texts.  Say you’re interested in organizing your friends based on area code (for whatever reason, just go here with us…) — this is nearly impossible to do by reading your text messages, but is quite easy if you simply export your contact list. Make sense?

SD Manage (one of many awesome data management tools in our Standard Data toolkit) solves this problem by adding structure to unstructured data that needs to be cleaned, organized, and… well, managed.

To see SD Manage in action, check out our work with the Georgia Department of Public Health —we took a series of weekly PDF reports, chock full of unstructured data, and converted them all to a dynamic, visually stimulating, functional dashboard complete with trend reporting, county-by-county maps, and structure.  This is just one way we’re setting the Standard for data management.

As always, we’re here to support your data management journey — as structured or unstructured as that journey may be. Let’s talk. We’re looking forward to helping you do more with data.

All the best,

Team Standard Co

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