"A power tool for working with messy data"

The original creator David Huynh said Refine is:

• more powerful than a spreadsheet
• more interactive and visual than scripting
• more provisional / exploratory / experimental / playful than a database

Explore - navigate and evaluate quality with visualizations and filters that help dig deeply into the data so you can get to know it better

Clean - efficiently discover and fix inconsistency with faceting, clustering, cell transforms, GREL (Google Refine Expression Language) expressions

Transform - easily change formats, subset, or reshape with split/join multi valued cells, split columns, transpose columns/rows

Enrich - extend and enhance data by combining files, merging projects, fetching URLs, reconciliation with online databases

Automate - record and preserve your processing routine for transparency, then automate reuse by exporting operation history in JSON

Illustration from the Openscapes blog by Julia Lowndes and Allison Horst.