IPA FE Subject A 2024 Question 15
A question IPA Japan published in 令和６年度 基本情報技術者試験 科目A 公開問題 問15, translated into English. ITPEC is based on the same exams.
Which of the following is a case that describes the processing of converting unstructured data into structured data as a preliminary stage of big data analysis?
Explanation
Social media reviews broken into words and summaries, then stored in a relational database — the only case whose input is unstructured data and whose output is structured data.
Structured data has a fixed format of rows and columns, like a relational table or a spreadsheet. Unstructured data has no such format: free text, images, audio, video. Free-text reviews on social media are unstructured; splitting them into words with machine learning, summarising them and storing the results as records in a relational database gives them a structure that can be queried and analysed. That is the preparation step the question describes.
Answer (d)
Why not others:
- •(a) — the financial data already sits in a relational database, so it is structured before and after; extracting rows into a spreadsheet only changes one structured format into another
- •(b) — anonymisation removes the ability to identify individuals for privacy; it changes the content, not the data's structure
- •(c) — unifying spellings in an address item (in Japanese place names “ヶ” and “が” are written both ways) is data cleansing of data that is already structured into items
Key rule: Structuring means turning free-form data (text, images, audio) into fixed fields and records; cleansing, anonymising and extracting work on data that is already structured.
System Strategy · AI-written, may contain errors
This question comes from the past questions IPA Japan publishes, translated into English by ITPEC Practice. ITPEC Practice is an independent study tool and is not affiliated with IPA or ITPEC. See the original paper (PDF) or Report an issue.