Data mapping describes the process of creating data element mappings between two distinct data models.
For example a company that would like to transmit and recieve purchases and invoices to other companies might use data mapping to create data maps from a company's data to X12 messages.
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.
Today most data mappings are done manually with tools such as Altova's MapForce. These are graphical tools that allow a user to "draw" lines from fields one set of data to another. Transformation programs are automatically created in XSLT, [[Java programming language]Java] or C++.
In the future, tools based on semantic web languages such as RFD and OWL will make data mapping a more automatic process. Full automated data mapping is a very difficult problem (see Semantic translation).