Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Category
Data exchange
Summary
Data exchange is the process of taking data structured under a source schema and transforming it into a target schema, so that the target data is an accurate representation of the source data. Data exchange allows data to be shared between different computer programs.
It is similar to the related concept of data integration except that data is actually restructured (with possible loss of content) in data exchange. There may be no way to transform an instance given all of the constraints. Conversely, there may be numerous ways to transform the instance (possibly infinitely many), in which case a "best" choice of solutions has to be identified and justified.
In some domains, a few dozen different source and target schema (proprietary data formats) may exist. An "exchange" or "interchange format" is often developed for a single domain, and then necessary routines (mappings) are written to (indirectly) transform/translate each and every source schema to each and every target schema by using the interchange format as an intermediate step. That requires a lot less work than writing and debugging the hundreds of different routines that would be required to directly translate each and every source schema directly to each and every target schema.
Examples of these transformative interchange formats include:
Standard Interchange Format for geospatial data;
Data Interchange Format for spreadsheet data;
Open Document Format for spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents;
GPS eXchange Format or Keyhole Markup Language for describing GPS data; and
GDSII for integrated circuit layout.
Modeling language
A data interchange (or exchange) language/format is a language that is domain-independent and can be used for data from any kind of discipline. They have "evolved from being markup and display-oriented to further support the encoding of metadata that describes the structural attributes of the information.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.