If you deal with large amounts of data and especially if you use spreadsheets to work with it, there is a new tool for you. Freebase Gridworks allows you to upload data and then examine, filter and do data cleanup for ‘grid-shaped data.’ Visit the Gridworks project site for more information and videos that more fully explain and demonstrate some of the functionality of this tool.
Short List of Gridworks Functions
- Bring similar data together for normalization (CIT and C.I.T. or just plain old data entry errors)
- Create facets based on any column of data
- Make graphs of any two columns to quickly visualize relationships
- Pull data from the Freebase database to add to your own data
- Make external data sets more useful by creating linking
This is just a brief list, but visit the site for more detail and see how Gridworks could save you time in data cleanup or help to create visualizations you couldn’t before.
Gridworks has been acquired by Google and it now known as Google Refine. It seems like the same tool for now, but there could be changes coming.