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

Recipe 1 – sorting data


In this recipe, you will learn how to sort data as a visual aid and how to reorder rows permanently as a prerequisite for more advanced operations.

Because sorted values are easier to explore and manipulate, sorting data is certainly something you will want to do at some point when working with OpenRefine; you can either use the sorted values as a visual aid or reorder your records permanently. In order to sort your data by their Record ID, for instance, choose Sort... in the column menu to access the following window:

Cell values can be sorted according to their type: text (case-sensitive or not), numbers, dates, or Boolean values. For each type, we are offered two possible sorting orders:

  • Text: alphabetical (a to z) or reversed alphabetical (z to a)

  • Numbers: smallest first or largest first

  • Dates: earliest first or latest first

  • Booleans: false then true or true then false

Moreover, we can select where errors and blanks will be stored in relation to the valid values by dragging...