II. A DATA FRAMEWORK FOR BI
STRUCTURED VS. SEMI-STRUCTURED DATA
BI requires analysts to deal with both structured and semi-structured data [Rudin and Cressy,
2003; Moss, 2003]. The term semi-structured data is used for all data that does not fit neatly into
relational or flat files, which is called structured data. We use the term semi-structured (rather
than the more common unstructured) to recognize that most data has some structure to it. For
example, e-mail is divided into messages and messages are accumulated into file folders. 2