What is Google Refine:
Google Refine is a power tool for working with messy data, cleaning it up, transforming it from one format into another, extending it with web services, and linking it to databases like Freebase.
Now the features are described below:
Data Loaded in Google Refine:
One of the most exciting features of Google refine is faceting.
Facet is created on a particular column. The facet summarizes the cells in that column to give a big picture on that column, and allows to filter to some subset of rows for which their cells in that column satisfy some constraint.
The Clustering feature can be accessed in 2 different ways. If you have already created a default text facet on a column, the text facet will show a "Cluster" button near its top right corner. If you haven't, you can invoke the column's drop-down menu and pick Edit cells > Cluster and edit..
Google Refine supports "expressions" mostly to transform existing data or to create new data based on existing data
One can use Google Refine to perform reconciliation of names in your data against any database that exposes a web service following this Reconciliation Service API specification. One such database is Freebase.
