Legal Research

Google Refine

By Michael Lines

A few days ago Google released a very interesting tool: Google Refine 2.0. For anyone who’s ever had to sort through messy data to try to turn up a meaningful treatment, and who hasn’t, this tool is a godsend. You may never need to utter another regular expression.

It offers a suite of functions that allow a person to clean up the data (detect and remove inconsistencies), to transform the data into formats suitable to the final destination (such as html), and even tools for finding and adding more data from disparate sources.

There are three 6+ minute videos at the link above demonstrating some of the basics, and I watched the all. That really surprised me.

The software is open source and desktop based. Details here.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on November 12, 2010 (boomark / email).