L⁻¹T⁻¹ETL

A lot of extract-transform-load (ETL) work requires unloading and un-transforming first. Rather than \(ETL\), it’s \(L_A^{-1}T_A^{-1}ET_BL_B\). What the data provider did is \(A\). What you want to do is \(B\).

The data provider gave you a “dump” of their data. You don’t know what it means. If you did, you could extract (subset) from it according to your needs – filter entities by some meaningful criteria and collect selected attributes.

They had data in some intelligible form, extracted what they needed at the time, transformed it for input to a processing/analysis system, and loaded the transformed extraction into that system. And now you have an export from that system.

So, you need to reverse their loading and then their transforming (cf. “data munging/wrangling”) in order to align it to your conceptual model. Only then can you extract from it, subset it according to your present needs. Then, you want to process/analyze it efficiently, so you transform it according to the logical/external model of your processing/analysis system. Finally, you load it into that system, which stores the data according to some physical/internal (on-disk / in-memory) model.

You get results. You publish them. You publish the data. How? Do you publish an export of the physical model? The cycle continues.