Is this worth looking into for someone who already knows perl, R and the unix zoo? Or is it more targetted at people who don't deal with data on a regular basis?
One place where Refine distinguishes itself compared to those tools are its quick visualizations of subsets of the data. In the article the author is able to tell that a column is always blank, and thus worth dropping, but Refine can do a lot more there.
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Is this worth looking into for someone who already knows perl, R and the unix zoo? Or is it more targetted at people who don't deal with data on a regular basis?
It's another string to the bow - so why not?
Have a quick look over the screen casts. If you're familiar with those tools you'll map the concepts pretty quickly.
http://code.google.com/p/google-refine/
One place where Refine distinguishes itself compared to those tools are its quick visualizations of subsets of the data. In the article the author is able to tell that a column is always blank, and thus worth dropping, but Refine can do a lot more there.