Everyone instinctively knows that the amount of data available to everyone is enormous and growing at an accelerating rate.
The amount of global data is estimated to grow to 175 zettabyes by 2025 at growth rate of 65% every year (175 Zettabytes By 2025 (forbes.com)).
To put that in perspective, that’s 23 terrabytes of data for every man, woman and child alive on the planet today.
And 80% of that data is unstructured data which means it can be difficult to find and utilise.
But what is unstructured data?
Unstructured data is data that is not held in any taxonomy, classification system, or structured relational database. This includes information such as emails, videos, web pages, reports, powerpoints and so on.
The question you may ask therefore is why isn’t data of this type stored in structures? The main reason is that this would create a huge overhead for anyone creating information. Just imagine that instead of writing that 30 second quick email, before you hit send, you would have to ensure that the email was created in an approved template, tagged with all the meta-data the taxonomy system required, and correctly classified. And who creates all the classification systems anyway. Who ensures these are consistent and policed across your company, across your customers and supplies, across the world? Its impossible.
The simple fact is that we have to live with huge amounts of unstructured data which contain vital knowledge and need systems and technology to help us access it.
As the amount of data we need to access to do our jobs efficiently increases including a mixture of both internal and external data sources it is becoming apparent that traditional enterprise search and taxonomy based systems are not fit for purpose. A global 2021 survey by Sailpoint indicated that 99% of companies report175 zettabyes by 2025 challenges in managing access to unstructured data, 76% experience unstructured data issues, and 42% of companies admit they don’t know where all their data exists.
As a methodology to be used in today’s businesses, taxonomies are dead.
This is where AI technology can help by looking at information in a different way and taking the drudgery out of information searches.
iKVA’s solutions are based on cutting edge vector mapping technology which looks at and understand the entire content and context of a document (where a document can be any collection of unstructured data including Tweets, emails, videos, reports, web pages, powerpoints and so on). There is no reliance on taxonomies, standardises structures, meta-data, or tags meaning the most unstructured of data can be processed, brought together in one virtual place, and then made accessible to users with a single information query.
