What are structures of big data?

[shivajikobardan]

I am learning about 3 V's of big data. I am learning about variety at the moment. They say variety represents variety of formats, data sources and structures. I understand format might be txt, audio, video files etc. Sources might be different sources of data. But what is structures of data?

 

[BigBeachBanana]

There are three types of structure of big data. They are namely: structured, unstructured, and semi-structured.

1. Structured data conforms to a tabular format and relationships between different rows and columns. You can think of data on excel sheets as a typical example. It’s considered the most “traditional” type of data storage.
2. Unstructured data comes in an anonymous form and cannot be stored in traditional ways, and cannot be analyzed unless it’s transformed into a structured format. You can think of multimedia content like audio, videos, images as examples of unstructured data.
3. Semi-structured data doesn’t conform with the formal structure of data models. But it comes with some kinds of organizational tags or other markers that help separate semantic elements and enforce hierarchies of fields and records within that data. You can think of JSON documents or XML files as this type of big data. The reason behind the existence of this category is semi-structured information is significantly more straightforward to analyze than unstructured data.