"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.