The import and export of data is the automated or semi-automated input and output of data sets between different software applications. It involves "translating" from the format used in one application into that used by another, where such translation is accomplished automatically via machine processes, such as

transcoding Transcoding is the direct digital-to-digital conversion of one encoding to another, such as for video data files, audio files (e.g., MP3, WAV), or character encoding (e.g., UTF-8, ISO/IEC 8859). This is usually done in cases where a target ...

, data transformation, and others. True exports of data often contain data in raw formats otherwise unreadable to end-users without the user interface that was designed to render it. Import and export of data shares semantic analogy with copying and pasting, in that sets of data are copied from one application and pasted into another. In fact, the

software development Software development is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, programming, documenting, testing, and bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applications, frameworks, or other software components. Software development inv ...

behind operating system clipboards (and clipboard extender apps) greatly concerns the many details and challenges of data transformation and transcoding, in order to present the end user with the illusion of effortless copy and paste between any two apps, no matter how internally different. The "Save As" command in many applications requires much of the same engineering, when files are saved as another file format. The ability to import and export data (or lack of such ability) has large economic implications, because it can be resource-intensive to input data in non-automated ways (such as manual rekeying), and because lack of

interoperability Interoperability is a characteristic of a product or system to work with other products or systems. While the term was initially defined for information technology or systems engineering services to allow for information exchange, a broader def ...

and data portability between systems unable to import or export data between each other causes

stovepiping Stovepiping (also stove piping) is a metaphorical term which recalls a stovepipe's function as an isolated vertical conduit, and has been used, in the context of intelligence, to describe several ways in which raw intelligence information may be ...

, lack of opportunity and efficiencies such as those seen in, for example, mash-ups, and may not suffice in its ability to search for information as enabled by tools such as

grep 


grep is a  command-line utility for searching plain-text data sets for lines that match a regular expression. Its name comes from the  ed command ''g/re/p'' (''globally search for a regular expression and print matching lines''), which has the sa ...

Extract, Transform, Load Data Flow Diagram

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* Input/output {{computer science stub

See also

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External links