An overview of some options for the import, export and additional file based operations is given in the image below. The import wizard provides a very flexible tool to import data from tab-separated text files, e.g. generated from a foreighn tool or database. With the list export you may generate tab-separated text files from the database. The export and re-import of tab-separated list allows external editing of the data in e.g. spread sheet programs. For this purpose especially the Matrix wizard is very suitable. As an alternative the questionnaires allow editing of data in an HTML form, which can be done with any internet browser. The modified data can be "downloaded" as text files and re-imported into the database. Even new description data may be collected using the questionnaires without the need of a direct database access.
The CSV export provides a direct copy of selected database tables by means of the Microsoft SQL Server. These copies might be used for archiving purposes or if a foreighn application shall be supplied with data.
The most popular genuine formats for storing and exchanging descriptive data are DELTA and SDD, which are both supported for import and export. The structured export additionally allows generation of EML files, that provide metadata as XML and descriptive data as text table. A spin-off of the import and export functions for structured data is the file conversion, which may even be used without any database access. Additionally the SDD and EML structured XML files may be checked for conformance to their XML schemas.
Finally the cache database is providing descriptive data to external partners, e.g. a webportal.