Import and export of data on:
[Wikipedia]
[Google]
[Amazon]
The import and export of data is the automated or semi-automated 
input and output
In computing, input/output (I/O, or informally io or IO) is the communication between an information processing system, such as a computer, and the outside world, possibly a human or another information processing system. Inputs are the signals ...
of data set A data set (or dataset) is a collection of data. In the case of tabular data, a data set corresponds to one or more database tables, where every column of a table represents a particular variable, and each row corresponds to a given record of the ...
s between different software application
Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work.
At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...
s. 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 d ...
, data transformation
In computing, data transformation is the process of converting data from one format or structure into another format or structure. It is a fundamental aspect of most data integrationCIO.com. Agile Comes to Data Integration. Retrieved from: htt ...
, 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 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 defi ...
and data portability Data portability is a concept to protect users from having their data stored in "silos" or "walled gardens" that are incompatible with one another, i.e. closed platforms, thus subjecting them to vendor lock-in and making the creation of data backups ...
between systems unable to import or export data between each other causes stovepiping, lack of opportunity and efficiencies such as those seen in, for example, mash-ups
Mashup may refer to:
* Mashup (culture), the rearrangement of spliced parts of musical pieces as part of a subculture
* Mashup (education), combining various forms of data and media by a teacher or student in an instructional setting
* Mashup (mus ...
, 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 ...
.
See also
*Data dump
A database dump contains a record of the table structure and/or the data from a database and is usually in the form of a list of SQL statements ("SQL dump"). A database dump is most often used for backing up a database so that its contents can b ...
as export from databases
*Data portability Data portability is a concept to protect users from having their data stored in "silos" or "walled gardens" that are incompatible with one another, i.e. closed platforms, thus subjecting them to vendor lock-in and making the creation of data backups ...
*Solid (web decentralization project)
Solid (Social Linked Data) is a web decentralization project led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, originally developed collaboratively at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The project "aims to radical ...
: allows users to control and export their own data
References
External links
* Input/output {{computer science stub