Re: Google Refine 2.0

(Sorry I haven't played with Google Refine 2.0, but I would like to  
make some comments)

>
> 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).

I appreciate every work David does, although some of them I haven't  
had a chance to play with. Recently when I introduce Linked Data, I  
start with some demos of instances of Exhibit. I call it a Raw Data  
application, talk about the trait that you can have different views of  
the same data. Then I go into data integration, and call out the need  
of cross-domain Raw Data. I try to avoid talking about triples and RDF.

I sometimes try to explain that Tabulator and Exhibit share a key  
point in terms of infrastructure - client side database, and explains  
that the extension version of Tabulator could have been even better  
cause every tab shares the same database so it can do cross-domain  
data integration. It doesn't work very well because Tabulator doesn't  
look as good as Exhibit.

I tried to initiate an effort to embed Exhibit into Tabulator, but  
just didn't spend enough time on it so it didn't happen. But I still  
think it is a good project to do.

Side questions:

1. Exhibit used to suffer from the problem that if the amount of data  
is too big it became very slow because Javascript wasn't very fast at  
the time. Will IndexedDB solve this problem? Have anyone tried that?

2. Does anyone know of any good UI for query-by-example, used by  
Tabulator (and hence its name)? I still think it's the most overlooked  
feature of Tabulator which is theoretically a powerful and general  
feature, but it suffered from poor usability.


Cheers,
Kenny

Received on Friday, 12 November 2010 21:30:05 UTC