Content, or soft information, has always been of interest to the business in a wide range of processes, from marketing to executive decision-making. The explosion in volume and variety of soft information driven, in particular, by the Internet has sharpened that interest. However, with years of experience in business intelligence and data warehousing behind them, many users are clear that what they really need is an integrated view of soft information with the harder data already available in the warehouse. While soft information on its own does have value, the real business advantage will come from exploring the entire set of hard and soft information free from the limitations of the pervasive, predefined data structures of hard information.

Content and data are closely related. Data is what IT has made of content in order to control and process it in the structured world of computers. Content as simple as “I’ll buy that red car” is transformed into a purchase transaction, with defined fields, allowed value ranges and keys normalized in a database. The use of two distinct words, “data” and “content” is unfortunate, since both are the same concept — information. Content is softer information, while data is harder; two terms at opposite ends of a continuum. At the softer end, information exists as commonly used and interpreted by humans — documents, images, etc. Hard information is the structured records and fields suitable for logical and numerical computer processing, for example, in operational systems.