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

Summary


This chapter has introduced recipes for advanced data operations. We have looked at multi-valued cells in different ways: when they had values of equal importance, we split them across several rows; when they had a different function, we split them across columns. We have also seen that OpenRefine has a special mode for working with multi-valued cells spread over different rows called records mode. In records mode, multiple rows that belong to the same object can be treated as one, giving you powerful search and manipulation options.

We also introduced you to clustering, which is really helpful if some of your cell values need to be consistent but are actually a bit messy. You can even go further and define your own transformation operations on cell values, and even create a new column based on an existing one. Finally, you have learned how to move data flexibly across rows and columns. Therefore, this chapter has given you access to the advanced possibilities offered by OpenRefine...