5.a) List and explain common data types in IoT applications.
Answer:
Common data types in IoT applications:
- Structured data
- Unstructured data
1. Structured data
- These are typically text data that have a pre-defined structure. These are primarily created by using length-limited data fields such as phone numbers, social security numbers, and other such information.
- Structured data are associated with relational database management systems (RDBMS).
- Even if the data is human or machine generated, these data are easily searchable by querying algorithms as well as human generated queries.
- Common usage of this type of data is associated with flight or train reservation systems, banking systems, inventory controls, and other similar systems.
- Established languages such as Structured Query Language (SQL) are used for accessing these data in RDBMS.
- However, in the context of IoT, structured data holds a minor share of the total generated data over the Internet.
2. Unstructured data
- In simple words, all the data on the Internet, which is not structured, is categorized as unstructured.
- These data types have no pre-defined structure and can vary according to applications and data-generating sources.
- Some of the common examples of human-generated unstructured data include text, emails, videos, images, phone recordings, chats, and others.
- Some common examples of machine-generated unstructured data include sensor data from traffic, buildings, industries, satellite imagery, surveillance videos, and others.
- As already evident from its examples, this data type does not have fixed formats associated with it, which makes it very difficult for querying algorithms to perform a look-up.
- Querying languages such as NoSQL are generally used for this data type.