As we begin to interpret the unstructured documents in our companies and on the World Wide Web, we will blur the lines between unstructured and structured data, and between the documents and the database. Many products on the market and in development purport to help with this process, but there are no clear winners as of yet. What is clear is that this is a trend that will feed on itself, and our ability to structure our unstructured information will continuously improve.
As this happens, as query and search technology improves, and as we begin to standardize on a few ontologies, we will see a real breakthrough in the quality of meaningful information available to us.
Uninterpreted data isn't worth anything to businesses or individuals. The value of interpreted data varies greatly. In the next chapter we take up the issue of how business rules can aid in the process of interpreting and creating meaning from data.