Portions of a JEAN entity base, one or more categories and their descendants, can be exported to a file. The format of these files is XML with a published schema so that they are accessible to other programs. This is in fact the mechanism used for ETV operations, an export file is transformed to HTML to be viewed in a browser.
Exported files can be imported into a different JEAN installation. This provides a way of exchanging data. When an exported file is imported it is placed at the same position in the catalog as it originated from. If there is already an entity at that position then its attributes will be updated with the values from the import. If there are links to imported entities from outside the exported part then JEAN will do its best to create equivalent links in the imported part. Similiarly JEAN will do its best to satisfy any cross-references to other catalogs. JEAN will ask for confirmation before it creates or replaces any data; because of this import can be a lengthy operation.. Because of this and because of the possible data loss when importing into existing entities, import is only available to administrators.