Book Image

Using OpenRefine

Book Image

Using OpenRefine

Overview of this book

Data today is like gold - but how can you manage your most valuable assets? Managing large datasets used to be a task for specialists, but the game has changed - data analysis is an open playing field. Messy data is now in your hands! With OpenRefine the task is a little easier, as it provides you with the necessary tools for cleaning and presenting even the most complex data. Once it's clean, that's when you can start finding value. Using OpenRefine takes you on a practical and actionable through this popular data transformation tool. Packed with cookbook style recipes that will help you properly get to grips with data, this book is an accessible tutorial for anyone that wants to maximize the value of their data. This book will teach you all the necessary skills to handle any large dataset and to turn it into high-quality data for the Web. After you learn how to analyze data and spot issues, we'll see how we can solve them to obtain a clean dataset. Messy and inconsistent data is recovered through advanced techniques such as automated clustering. We'll then show extract links from keyword and full-text fields using reconciliation and named-entity extraction. Using OpenRefine is more than a manual: it's a guide stuffed with tips and tricks to get the best out of your data.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Using OpenRefine
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 1. Diving Into OpenRefine

In this opening chapter, we will discover what OpenRefine is made for, why you should use it, and how. After a short introduction, we will go through seven fundamental recipes that will give you a foretaste of the power of OpenRefine:

  • Recipe 1 – installing OpenRefine

  • Recipe 2 – creating a new project

  • Recipe 3 – exploring your data

  • Recipe 4 – manipulating columns

  • Recipe 5 – using the project history

  • Recipe 6 – exporting a project

  • Recipe 7 – going for more memory

Although every recipe can be read independently from the others, we recommend that readers who are new to OpenRefine stick to the original order, at least for the first few recipes, since they provide crucial information about its general workings. More advanced users who already have an OpenRefine installation running can pick our tricks in any order they like.