Wednesday, November 06, 2002

Unstructured Data Popular columnist, Jon Udell, weighs in on Phil Windley's comments on unstructured data.  There are all kinds of options here that we are exploring, but Phil's right on about the ROI issue - very hard to determine.  Several Utah agencies are using IBM's Content Manager (not to be confused with Interwoven and other web content management tools) and have suggested making that an enterprise solution for unstructured data.  The master index could reside on the mainframe and allow us to search databases, video, text documents, email, and other unstructured data.  On several occasions, I have strolled through the State Archives temporary storage warehouse, a huge facility with rows and rows of shelving, 10-15 feet high, of boxes of documents.  It's a challenge just to manage the boxes and their content, without even attempting to deal with the content of the documents themselves. And Archives only receives a fraction of what is actually produced.  Jon talks about providing guidance for naming conventions.  It sounds simple, but requires a degree of discipline that most large organizations seldom have. More Jon Udell columns: Blogspace Under the Microscope Personal RSS Aggregators Connecting with Web Services Google and Weblogs 1:15:44 PM

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