Google Refine is an update to the Freebase Gridworks tool for cleaning up large, messy spreadsheets. It has been designed to make it easy to correct the most common errors you’ll encounter in human-created datasets. For example, it’s easy to spot and correct common problems like typos or inconsistencies in text values and to change cells from one format to another. There’s also rich support for linking data by calling APIs with the data contained in existing rows to augment the spreadsheet with information from external sources.
Refine doesn’t let you do anything you can’t with other tools, but its power comes from how well it supports a typical extract and transform workflow. It feels like a good step up in abstraction, packaging processes that would typically take multiple steps in a scripting language or spreadsheet package into single operations with sensible defaults.
