Re: Google Refine 2.0

On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 6:52 AM, Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com>wrote:

> David:
> I hope you understand that if a response doesn't start with:
> "Congratulations David...", it doesn't mean I am criticizing your work. You
> know me much better than that, I hope, as per my comments above to Leigh.
>

Kingsley, of course, I was just ... picking on you :-) 'cause every first
response I get from you is along the line, "does it do RDF?" :-) No, I don't
"do" RDF anymore, but I give away ideas, UI designs, code, and make my stuff
extensible so that if you want to do RDF on it, you can.


I just asked a question, where the focus of the question was scoped to an
> area of Google Refine that I hadn't looked into i.e., beyond its core ETL
> functionality. Again, an aspect, not the whole thing.
>
> FWIW - I watched the video after sending my initial mail, and it didn't
> answer my question re. endgame. None of that diminishes the splendor of
> Google Refine. Anyway, when we're done with Pivot, a lot of the ramblings we
> had (offline) should become much clearer i.e., the area that I've always
> been interested in i.e., making Linked Data absolute fun for end-users, and
> in the process evolve them into "Citizen Data Analysts".  We took this
> journey once before via ODBC, but ODBC has platform specificity, data model,
> and data representation limitations that don't exist in the Linked Data
> realm. On the other hand though, ODBC ecosystem established solid patterns
> (loose coupling of compliant applications and drivers) that made it fun --
> once you got past the aforementioned shortcomings.


I'm pretty sure we're on the same page regarding the big vision: make data
more fun, more useful, and easier to deal with. My focus is on a smaller and
more immediate problem: how to let people handle messy data (without having
to resort to programming, or a $500K enterprise level data analysis
package). There are plenty of existing ETL software products, and even open
source projects

    http://code.google.com/p/google-refine/wiki/RelatedSoftware

But Refine is intended to be for non-expert users and one-off use cases (as
opposed to building a persistent data pipeline).

David