Data mapping

In computing and data management, data mapping is the process of creating data element mappings between two distinct data models. Data mapping is used as a first step for a wide variety of data integration tasks including:

For example, a company that would like to transmit and receive purchases and invoices with other companies might use data mapping to create data maps from a company's data to standardized ANSI ASC X12 messages for items such as purchase orders and invoices.

X12 standards are generic Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) standards designed to allow a company to exchange data with any other company, regardless of industry. The standards are maintained by the Accredited Standards Committee X12 (ASC X12), with the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) accredited to set standards for EDI. The X12 standards are often called ANSI ASC X12 standards.

In the future, tools based on semantic web languages such as Resource Description Framework (RDF), the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and standardized metadata registry will make data mapping a more automatic process. This process will be accelerated if each application performed metadata publishing. Full automated data mapping is a very difficult problem (see Semantic translation).

Data mappings can be done in a variety of ways using procedural code, creating XSLT transforms or by using graphical mapping tools that automatically generate executable transformation programs. These are graphical tools that allow a user to "draw" lines from fields in one set of data to fields in another. Some graphical data mapping tools allow users to "Auto-connect" a source and a destination. This feature is dependent on the source and destination data element name being the same. Transformation programs are automatically created in SQL, XSLT, Java programming language or C++. These kinds of graphical tools are found in most ETL Tools (Extract, Transform, Load Tools) as the primary means of entering data maps to support data movement. Examples include SAP BODS and Informatica PowerCenter.

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