This post is actually aimed more at my less technical readers than my programmer friends.

Google Refine, formerly Freebase Gridworks, is a data cleanup and transformation tool. These days, though, it seems as if everyone has to work with messy data. Lists of addresses, employment rosters, film collections, sports stats, and/or any amount of public material. Such data is rarely clean, and that’s precisely what makes a tool like Google Refine so useful.
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The official announcements are out, and my former employer Metaweb no longer exists. I’m happy that the ideas, and most of the people, have found a home, but it feels strange that the company is no longer a distinct entity. In many ways it makes a lot of sense for Google to end up owning them, and I hope the former-Metaweb-now-Google employees prosper.
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I’ve been eagerly awaiting the latest upgrade to freebase.com (which I work on), because it makes much more interesting saved views possible with our UI. Previously, all kinds of interesting queries were possible using our query language, MQL, but to present their output you’d effectively need to write your own application. Now you can make queries using the UI and then have them displayed intelligently on Freebase.
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I’ve been playing around with literary awards in Freebase recently, mainly the novel/fiction Booker, Pulitzer, National Book Award, Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards.
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Depending on how well they can deal with spam, and how open they make it, this could be a big deal. Google are letting users edit locations in Google Maps.
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Since last Thursday I’ve essentially been in the the grip of a compulsion to enter data into Freebase.
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Despite having worked at Metaweb for almost a year, and despite my OCD tendencies, I had avoided getting sucked in by the allure of correcting/completing/entering data in Freebase, the web frontend to our attempt at structuring all the world’s information. I had avoided it until today, that is.
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