Refinement
OK so Google Refine snuck up on me – had never heard of it when it was Freebase Gridworks. Spend [...]
Posted on February 1st, 2011 by marc
OK so Google Refine snuck up on me – had never heard of it when it was Freebase Gridworks.
Spend at least 8 minutes watching the first video here.
Another significant nail in the coffin for spreadsheet macros and half baked scripts.
I will be surprised if this doesn’t immediately become a staple in Macquarie Analytics, if not all of Informatics.
And it’s free. And it runs on your own machine regardless if you’re a PC, Mac or penguin as a localhost service accessible in a browser.
Other data oriented app vendors peddling proprietary closed platform-specific crapware should take note – this is how a data app should be done. OK, that is, with the addition of identity management, web services, xDBC connection and so on and so forth.
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Comments
Refine looks wonderful; like an interactive awk. I share your desire to reduce dependency on spreadsheets, but I don't think this will make a huge difference. For example, it looks like you can't change one cell and have all the changes propagate, which is fairly fundamental to how we use spreadsheets.
Matt Roberts - February 3, 2011
I wonder whether Refine is impacted by the Patriot Act in the USA in any way? I know there was much concern about staff using Gmail for this reason.
Colleagues in IT have flagged that many Informatics databases that contain sensitive University information - Financial, Project, Help desk, etc are USA based( hosted software as a service) with the information held on USA servers @task, help desk, etc. Does this not pose the same, if not greater risk than email? Does not seem that the same level of rigour to the University's information security was applied when selecting these products? Would not this have been a requirement when selecting the successful provider?
Nikki - February 18, 2011
Hi nsnikki1, and sorry for the delay in this getting posted - it got buried in my email queue. Responses follow:
I think it's reasonable to point out the pink elephant - a huge proportion of internet hosting is done in the USA. Just look at trans-pacific figures from Akamai for empirical evidence.
Nevertheless, OneHelp and OnePlan do not contain intellectual property of note - that is they contain no work product of the University in terms of research or teaching. They store transient operational data that has confidentiality for sure, but its loss or exposure would neither be competitively disadvantageous or strategically detrimental.
It is on this basis that we accepted the risk of the software-as-a-service model, and we do hold that this data is not as valuable as the intellectual property in (staff) email.
It's true that as we become more transactional in OnePlan and as we introduce stored value prepaid campus cards that this system's risk profile will alter and we'll need to re-assess impact, likelihood and mitigation of risk.
Regardless of any of this we have standard contractual and technical mitigation measures in place. Ironically, by the way, we are served with far more warrants from our OWN government than we ever encounter internationally.
Bottom line: each SaaS/cloud app must be assessed on its merits. We do this every time we look at a new application.
marc - March 1, 2011
On Refine - it's not a hosted app. You download it and run it locally, so it's immune to any issues associated with the Google cloud.
marc - March 1, 2011
Hi Marc
When are we going to get Live@Edu? Google and all of their beta products is not the answer and I want to be using technology I'll be using in the workplace when I graduate.
Cheers
Josh
Josh - April 25, 2011