Announcing RefinePro

Less than two weeks ago we announced the start up of RefinePro as a new participant of the OpenRefine ecosystem. This post provides background on where we come from and how we see the position of RefinePro within OpenRefine community.

Why a company?

I have been actively involved with the OpenRefine community since summer 2011 when I opened this blog to document tricks and tutorials regarding OpenRefine usage. I am also active on the mailing list to provide support and I maintain the twitter account to share project news and answer questions..

Over the last year I have witnessed how the community has grown. Today OpenRefine is downloaded over 1,000 times per week! MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) are being dedicated to OpenRefine. OpenRefine twitter feed is buzzing daily with new tutorials, workshop and blog articles.

Data wrangling and cleaning tools are getting in demand and we see a bright future for OpenRefine. We want to take Refine to the next level and to commit a full time dedicated team to close existing issues, develop new functionality and improve the level of support.

What next?

We plan first to provide a hosted access to OpenRefine to

• Make it easier for people to start with Refine by removing the installation process,
• Offer access to your project from multiple devices,
• Power up your project with more compute power.

We will be testing our business model and architecture through a beta access.

Reserve your spot for RefinePro beta today

If you already haven’t, you can help us by spreading the word about our initiative by email friends and coworkers and sharing the news on twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.

The content from this blog will migrate to RefinePro in order to keep branding consistent. We will notify our readers when this happens.

If you are just curious and want to stay in the loop you can subscribe to our mailing list (beta user are already registered) or follow us on twitter.