On 11/12/10 11:54 AM, David Huynh wrote:
On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 6:52 AM, Kingsley Idehen
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
David:
I hope you understand that if a response doesn't start with:
"Congratulations David...", it doesn't mean I am criticizing your
work. You know me much better than that, I hope, as per my
comments above to Leigh.
Kingsley, of course, I was just ... picking on you :-)
Yes, that's what I assumed initially, but then I inferred the rash of
"Congratulations David..." plus echos from Leigh (who might not have
picked up on the ribbing) as folks thinking that my mail was in some way
being critical, rather than continuing 3 year old (friendly) back and
forth etc..
'cause every first response I get from you is along the line, "does it
do RDF?" :-) No, I don't "do" RDF anymore, but I give away ideas, UI
designs, code, and make my stuff extensible so that if you want to do
RDF on it, you can.
I just asked a question, where the focus of the question was
scoped to an area of Google Refine that I hadn't looked into i.e.,
beyond its core ETL functionality. Again, an aspect, not the whole
thing.
FWIW - I watched the video after sending my initial mail, and it
didn't answer my question re. endgame. None of that diminishes the
splendor of Google Refine. Anyway, when we're done with Pivot, a
lot of the ramblings we had (offline) should become much clearer
i.e., the area that I've always been interested in i.e., making
Linked Data absolute fun for end-users, and in the process evolve
them into "Citizen Data Analysts". We took this journey once
before via ODBC, but ODBC has platform specificity, data model,
and data representation limitations that don't exist in the Linked
Data realm. On the other hand though, ODBC ecosystem established
solid patterns (loose coupling of compliant applications and
drivers) that made it fun -- once you got past the aforementioned
shortcomings.
I'm pretty sure we're on the same page regarding the big vision: make
data more fun, more useful, and easier to deal with. My focus is on a
smaller and more immediate problem: how to let people handle messy
data (without having to resort to programming, or a $500K enterprise
level data analysis package). There are plenty of existing ETL
software products, and even open source projects
Amen!
Our confluence is getting closer :-)
http://code.google.com/p/google-refine/wiki/RelatedSoftware
But Refine is intended to be for non-expert users and one-off use
cases (as opposed to building a persistent data pipeline).
David
--
Regards,
Kingsley Idehen
President& CEO
OpenLink Software
Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca: kidehen
