In the ever-evolving technology landscape, data analytics and data strategy continues to play a larger role in economics and business models. Director of the Center for Applied Artificial Intelligence at the University of St. Thomas, Dr. Manjeet Rege, co-hosts the “All Things Data” podcast with adjunct professor and Innovation Fellow Dan Yarmoluk. The podcast provides insight into the significance of data science as it relates to business models, business economics, and delivery systems. Through informative conversation with leading data scientists, business model experts, technologists, and futurists, Rege and Yarmoluk discuss how to utilize, harness, and deploy data science, data-driven strategies, and enable digital transformations.
Rege and Yarmoluk spoke with Kirk Marple about unstructured data start-ups and technology in general. As a customer-focused technology leader, Marple has over 25 years of experience developing media management pipelines, leading DevOps at venture-backed companies and structuring successful exits. He is currently the CEO and founder of Unstruk Data, a new company that is building the industry’s leading unstructured data warehouse for automating data preparation via metadata enrichment, integrated compute, and graph-based search.
Here are some highlights from their conversation:
Q. Would you define what the difference is between structured and unstructured data?
A. There are multiple definitions, but the way we look at it, structured data is the classic database – rows and columns, like a Google sheet or database. We’re in a parallel universe with unstructured data, which is basically anything perceived or created from a sensor, sometimes created by a human through a sensor, such as an image captured on your phone or audio captured by microphone and stored in a file. So, it’s individual file structures. You can think of it as media is almost a synonym, but we also deal with documents, CAD drawings, etc.
Q. Could you give some examples of applications that are ready right now and that people could leverage right now in the industry?
A. People don’t realize that semantic layer can really exist. When they think of search in an organization, they think of search on file names or search in a folder structure. It’s surprising how many people have document search problems – they’re not getting to the level of detail of creating this knowledge representation. Organizations have this massive amount of data, and in general that still seems like a problem for people. So, by creating this indexing layer on top of their data, it’s a valuable opportunity.
Listen to their conversation here:
