The data available today, both structured and unstructured, provides a great opportunity for businesses. The structured data resides in relational databases and unstructured data is all the other data, both textual and non-textual. Both structured and unstructured data can be used in a number of ways once a business knows how to access it. This might be through text mining or data mining, which are sometimes used interchangeably, though there is a distinct difference. As defined by the UK government, text and data mining (TDM) is “the process of deriving information from the machine-read material. It works by copying large quantities of material, extracting the data, and recombining it to identify patterns.” The core difference is that in text mining, the data is unstructured. In modern business, the data available needs to be accessed, analyzed and used properly.
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