Google Refine, the revamp of one of Google's summer acquisitions Freebase Gridworks, reached version 2.0 last month, adding an extension backend to the already powerful open source database cleaning software.Freebase Gridworks gained a significant following within the data journalism community due to ease of use, particularly with the implementation of algorithms.
Of course, "ease of use" is very much a relative term. If you have no idea transforming regular expressions means or what n-gram clustering is, well, this isn't going to do much for you. But for journalists and programmers whose job is to make data friendlier on a daily basis, Google Refine is a godsend.
