Re: Google Refine 2.0

On 11/12/10 11:54 AM, David Huynh wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 6:52 AM, Kingsley Idehen 
> <kidehen@openlinksw.com <mailto: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 :-)

Yes, that's what I assumed initially, but then I inferred the rash of 
"Congratulations David..." plus echos from Leigh (who might not have 
picked up on the ribbing) as folks thinking that my mail was in some way 
being critical, rather than continuing 3 year old (friendly) back and 
forth etc..


> '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

Amen!

Our confluence is getting closer :-)

>
> 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
>


-- 

Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	
President&  CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen