Records have been written for thousands of years, in many scripts and on many media. Clay tablets, stone tablets, wax tablets, papyrus, parchment, and paper all preceded digital media. In our hurry to move from paper to digital media, the most common shortcut has been to scan paper into PDF documents, which have the virtue of being digital and portable, but the drawback of being essentially unstructured.
What companies need as they streamline their operations is structured data, but getting from unstructured to structured documents has been time-consuming.
