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The IDRT Import and Mapping Tool (IMT) is a client application designed to run on your local machine. It doesn't need administrator's privileges.

Because it operates on the i2b2 database directly rather then using the i2b2 Web Service API, you need a physical connection to that database. This includes network access to the database server (check firewall when in doubt), a JDBC database driver (for PostgreSQL, it is supplied within the tool) and a database account that was granted the right to write to the required i2b2 project tables. If you used the i2b2 wizard to create a project, you already provided the credentials.

Architecture

The that allows you to import data into existing i2b2 projects and make changes to the i2b2 navigation ontology from your local computer without using the i2b2 workbench or the i2b2 web client.

The process of getting data into a data warehouse is often called ETL: *E*xtraction, *T*ransformation, *L*oading. Extraction means that data is gathered from a data source by parsing, therefore, an understanding of the underlying data model is required. Transformation is the process of mapping the source data model to the target data model, in this case i2b2's database schema for every data instance. Loading is a feature to persist the transformation by adding the data to the target (the i2b2 database).

Architecture

The IMT operates on two levels The big picture is shown below