Check out Google-Refine at http://code.google.com/p/google-refine/

google-refine Google Refine, a power tool for working with messy data (formerly Freebase Gridworks)

From Flowingdata.com …..

Find the names in your data with Mr. People

Inspired by Shan Carter's simple data converter, appropriately named Mr. Data Converter, Matthew Ericson just put Mr. People online. The tool lets you paste a list of names, and it will parse the first and last name, suffix, title, and other parts for you. You can even have multiple names in a single row.

Years ago, while trying to clean up the names of donors in campaign finance data from the Federal Election Commission, I hacked together a Perl module — loosely based on the Lingua-EN-NameParse module — to standardize names. One port to Ruby later, I've finally put together a Web front end for it.

Getting data in the right format, whether for analysis or visualization, can be a huge pain. Imagine. All the data you need is right in front of you, but you can't do anything with it yet, because as often is the case, it's not in a nice and pretty rectangular format. So anything that makes this easier and quicker is an instant bookmark for me.

[Mr. People via @mericson]

The Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk ) has been around for 13 years, and it has become increasingly important for analytic journalists who believe that simulation modeling is — and increasingly will be — an keystone perspective for serious, value-added journalism.  And it's one of the FREE e-journals available.  Support it if you can. 

In the meantime, if you're not familiar with agent-based modeling, check out this article by Lynne Hamill; it will point you to some useful concepts and tools:

Agent-Based Modelling: The Next 15 Years

by Lynne Hamill

http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/13/4/7.html  

Abstract

This short note makes recommendations for the future direction of research in agent-based modelling (ABM). It is a personal view based on my experience as a policy adviser who has recently come to ABM. I suggest that to promote the use of ABM, the ABM community needs demonstrate the value of modelling to other social scientists by showing-by-doing and offering training projects; and to produce tools, guidance on good-practice and basic building blocks. Then the policy contexts most likely to benefit from ABM need to be identified along with any new data requirements, so that the usefulness of ABM can be demonstrated to policy analysts. This is, in my view, the challenge facing the ABM community for the next 15 years.