Patent ID: 8862646

Claim:
A method for implementation by one or more data processors forming part of at least one computing system, the method comprising: accessing or crawling, by at least one data processor, data source locations available to a user to identify files comprising data; analyzing, by at least one data processor, each identified file to obtain attributes characterizing the file; generating, by at least one data processor in a graphical user interface, a data map characterizing the identified files along at least two dimensions, a first dimension being based on a first attribute of the corresponding identified file, a second dimension being based on a second attribute of the corresponding identified file, each identified file having a corresponding graphical user interface element, wherein the first attribute comprise a number of rows of a corresponding table and the second attribute comprises a number of columns of the corresponding table; receiving, by at least one data processor, user-generated input activating one of the graphical user interface elements with a corresponding identified file; and initiating, by at least one data processor, importation of the identified file corresponding to the activated graphical user interface element into an application; wherein at least one identified file is individually parsed into two or more components, the attributes are obtained for each component and each component has a different corresponding graphical user interface element within the data map.