Unlocking Unstructured Data | March Good Bits

Common file formats that we use every day like PDF, Word, Excel, email and images can contain a wealth of information, but accessing that data in a usable way can be difficult, especially when thousands of files need to be analyzed.

The challenge is twofold in that the data first needs to be extracted from the source document or file and then put into a usable format for analytics consumption or training machine learning models since the data may be largely unstructured.

The traditional way to extract this information is to employ teams of data entry operators to manually enter the data into a target system. Fortunately for organizations focused on digital transformation, there are a variety of tools and solutions that can help automate the process of unlocking data stuck in your myriad of PDF, Word, image and other files.

Bitwise recently published a blog on Effectively capturing unstructured data from tons of documents that provides our perspective on extracting data from these different file types.

Read the blog for an analysis of the challenges of extracting from semi-structured and unstructured data sources, and options for automating data extraction including a case study on successfully extracting data from thousands of PDF and Word documents.