The Four Principles of Semantic Parsing - DataScienceCentral.com

Over the last few decades, I have frequently heard vendors and developers talking about structured data, unstructured data, semi-structured data, and so forth. The arguments about what constitutes each of these categories get fairly vocal, particularly since everyone has a rough intuitive idea about what constitutes structure (tables) and what doesn't (text). However, I had an epiphany the other day that makes the distinction between the two obvious, and it has nothing to do with the amount of text a given "blob" of data contains. I'd argue that four principals dictate how data is structured: The first of these, the Parser Principle, describes what we mean by Structured Data. If a parser exists for identifying components within a block of text (a sequence of characters), then that text is structured.