Data flow
The term data flow has several meanings:
- As automatic data flow refers to the independent transmission of data from a measuring instrument in a memory or a processing unit without manual work. Compared to manual transmission, it is much faster and much less prone to errors. Typical examples are electronic timekeeping in sports (see also digital stopwatch ) or the flow of data in modern measuring devices ( total station ).
- In computer science and structured analysis , data flow means an element of a data flow diagram and names the data structures that are exchanged between two functions . The data flow defines the causal dependency of the functions and thus makes it possible to determine the concurrency of individual sub-processes.
- In the context of business process modeling, the data flow describes between which work steps (activities, tasks, actions) which data is exchanged. With some languages ( UML 2.0 activity diagrams) the control flow can be separated from the data flow. Data flows can be modeled in UML activity diagrams through UML object flows .
The principle of the data flow can also be used directly for programming, for example by using futures - in this way, a parallelization or sequentialization of the process flow can be planned automatically. The graphical programming language LabVIEW , for example, implements this approach.
In a concurrent environment, the data flow defines points of process synchronization for the transfer of data.