We have long argued that the fabled "80% of corporate content" remaining unstructured across an enterprise may really turn out on deeper examination to be quite structured or at least semi-structured. It's just that most people don't work in structured authoring/tagging/indexing systems and rarely see the benefits of doing so. In a nice review of the issue, Joseph Martins of the Data Mobility Group points out that the converse is true as well: many relational databases across an enterprise store unstructured content. To yield meaningful benefits most content management systems require you to tease more structure out of your documents and sometimes your data too, even if only to reuse a title across web pages. Going from static web pages and binary documents to dynamic HTML or rich XML is therefore a migration in more ways than one. So let's all agree that the data/document divide is at least partly cultural, and work together to glean more value and longevity from our expensive content...
Read Martin's 'Continuum' Article