Structured Data

A structured data has a defined data type and storage location. Defining and storing data in this way makes data simpler to quantify and use in analysis.

A database is used to store structured data, although due to their flexible nature it is also possible to store unstructured data in the form of structured data in a database. An example of doing this would be to store an image as binary data within a column of a data table; the binary data is structured data and no information has been lost from the image. The problem with this is that it is only possible to search or manipulate sections of binary, it is not possible to access the unstructured data contained within the image such as if the image contains a tree or a river. The solution to this is to use additional fields or tables to capture a meta description of the image which can then be searched.

It is possible to create structured data within a spreadsheet program such as Excel however the program will not strictly enforce data types, such a word can be typed into a column of numbers. Modern spreadsheet programs will highlight this type of mismatch but have a greater scope for allowing this type of human error to be present; a database will refuse to allow text in a numerical column.