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


In this chapter, we have seen how your dataset can be transformed from an isolated island into a connected collection of data. On one hand, you can perform reconciliation on columns that contain simple field values. Therefore, the text in the cells is given meaning by adding a URL to it which can be looked up online. You can either use the built-in Freebase reconciliation or install the RDF extension which allows reconciliation against Linked Data sources. On the other hand, you can perform named-entity recognition on cells that contain flowing text, again with an extension. This lets OpenRefine search for concepts inside the cell values, and it will try to find a URL for each of them. In the end, your dataset becomes enriched with links to other datasets, which is a valuable asset when you're publishing your dataset on the Web.