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Sources of Unstructured Big Data

Submitted by Akash Kumar, on October 17, 2018

Unstructured Big Data

Unstructured data is found everywhere. In fact, most individuals and organization conduct their lives around unstructured data. Like Structured Data the unstructured may be machine generated or generated by humans or organizational generated.

Sources of Unstructured Big Data

The following are the sources of unstructured big data:

1. Machine Generated Unstructured Data
2. Human Generated Unstructured Data
3. Organizational Generated Unstructured Data

Let us discuss each in details.

1. Machine Generated Unstructured Data

Following are some of the examples of machine-generated unstructured data, or in other words we can say that these are machine generated sources of unstructured data:

1. Satellite Images: It basically includes data about weather, or data that are captured by the government in its surveillance imagery. Perfect Example of this is Google Earth.
2. Scientific Data: This type of data basically includes seismic imagery, atmospheric data and high energy physics.
3. Photographs and video: This basically includes security video, surveillance video and traffic video and more such photography or videos.
4. Radar or Sonar Data: This basically includes vehicular, meteorological, and oceanographic seismic profiles.

2. Human Generated Unstructured Data

Following list is basically examples of human-generated unstructured data, or in other words we can say that these are human generated sources of unstructured data:

1. Text internal to your company: Think of all the text within document, logs, survey results, and emails. Enterprise information basically represents a large percent of the text information in today’s world.
2. Social Media Data: This data is basically generated from the social media platform such as YOUTUBE, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and many more such social sites.
3. Mobile Data: This type of Data basically includes text messages and location information.
4. Website Content: This type of Data basically comes from any site delivering unstructured content, like Flicks or Instagram.

3. Organizational Generated Unstructured Data

A simple example of this is the surveys or records released by an organization for example WHO's health record.

Patients records by the hospital are also the example of organizational generated unstructured data.