Role of semi-structured data in digital marketing.
In digital marketing, semi-structured data is a type of information that doesn’t reside in a relational database or any other data table. However, it has some organizational properties to make it simpler to analyze like semantic tags. The best example of semi-structured data is HTML code. HTML code doesn’t restrict the amount of information you want to gather in a document.
Some examples of semi-structured data is Email, RDF, Electronic data interchange (EDI), CSV, XML, and JSON documents, and NoSQL databases.
According to Matthew Magne, Global Product Marketing for Data Management at SAS, “Semi-structured data as a type of data that contains semantic tags, but doesn’t conform to the structure associated with a typical relational database. While semi-structured entities belong in the same class, they may have different attributes for example email, XML, and other markup languages”.
Role of semi-structured data in digital marketing
Semi-structured data have different structures and different roles because of the heterogeneity of the sources. Sometimes they don’t contain structure at all which makes it difficult to tag or index.
- XML is widely used to store and exchange semi-structured data. It allows its users to define tags and attributes to store the data in hierarchical form.
- Semi-structured data support users who cannot express their need in the structured query language. For example SOL, SPARQL, inquiry, etc.
- It can easily deal with the heterogeneity of sources.
- Through semi-structured data, it is possible to view structured data as semi-structured.
- Semi-structured data is portable.
- It supports for lists of objects simplifies data models by avoiding messy translation of lists into a relational data model.
Where you can see semi-structured data?
The place where semi-structured data reside in the middle of structured data and unstructured data. It carries some of the aspects which are structured and some which are not structured which means unstructured. For instance- X-Rays and other large images contain largely unstructured data-in this case, a great many pixels. It becomes impossible to search and query these X-rays. However, most of the files include a small section known as metadata. This opens a door to analyze unstructured data.
Conclusion
Folks, I hope that after reading this blog post you understood the concept of semi-structured data and its role in digital marketing. Semi-structured is a business data which doesn’t follow a fixed schema. A lot of data you will find on the web can be described as semi-structured.
Data integration in digital marketing especially makes use of semi-structured data.
This is all about ‘Semi Structured Data’. If you have any query or you wants to know more about anything else then kindly comment below. Get in touch with us for more updates.
