Structured versus Unstructured Information
By Kai Willenborg, SAP AG – 12/22/2000
Disclaimer: Please note that this edition was written in 2000. Therefore, statements in the articles, particularly those regarding SAP's products, product strategy, branding strategy, and organizational structure, may no longer be valid.
This article is an excerpt from the contribution "Reconciling Conflicts in Reporting" by Kai Willenborg. We cite this special part of Willenborg's article for the sake of a more straightforward access to topics directly referring to "Content".
Structured
Structured information means information that has been traditionally classed as a report. Here, data, characteristics, key figures, assignments and other attributes are presented in table or diagram form. The use of trees, grids, and other graphics is also usual. These structures enable diverse analyses. Reports do not always have to be created individually - a large proportion of report creation can be carried out automatically. Searching, sorting, filtering, highlighting and exceptions can be used as desired on individual attributes.
Unstructured
In contrast, documents that contain, for example, body texts, pictures, films, are unstructured information. They are often stored in different ways and created individually and manually rather than automatically. The search – apart from that of attributes in the document master record or document folders – is usually a free-text search using a text index that has been created with a special indexing program.
Blurring the Boundaries
Now, attributes in structured data can also contain unstructured information. Shorter and longer text attributes, and even longer body texts, are not unusual in practice. Moreover, unstructured documents do not exist in a vacuum, but are usually also linked to structured data (not only by a document master record and document storage).
Moreover, a text document can contain tables and diagrams, and tables in reports often contain cells with body text. Users often want to insert text into their reports that give background information about the displayed data. Here the transition is blurred, and it is unclear what has the higher status in a concrete document: the body text or the tables and diagrams.
Information is often not useful alone, but needs to be explained by its context. This is, of course, also true for the interaction of structured and unstructured information. Therefore, here too the operation of both types of information should remain as similar to each other as possible.
With information exchange, structured reports, as well as other documents, also have to be exchanged and distributed, and it users have to be able to add comments afterwards, not only on paper. Here it is also important that the information can be assigned in a targeted way within the document. In addition to this, comments that have already been made in the data source should also be accessible, without ruining the view of current data.
This means that reports and (in the case of report creation) their fundamental components, are searched for by attributes and parts as well as by their description. A data source can, for example, be searched for according to its fields or attributes, such as author, as well as by the descriptive text.
Lastly, it is must be said that searching for documents, when not using a text index but using document master record attributes, can be seen as master data reporting.
What Does this Mean?
The interlocking combination of structured and unstructured information allows information to be distributed better and more comprehensively. Moreover, learning and changeover expense is clearly reduced if the breach between them is removed.
