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 2 – faceting data


One of the functionalities of OpenRefine that you will use most often is faceting. Facets do not affect the values of your data, but they allow you to get useful insights of your dataset; you can think of facets as various ways to look at your data, just like the facets of a gemstone that still have to be refined. Facets also allow you to apply a transformation to a subset of your data, as they allow you to display only rows corresponding to a given criterion.

In this recipe, we will explore the various ways of faceting data depending on their values and on your needs: text facets for strings, numeric facets for numbers and dates, a few predefined customized facets, and finally how to use stars and flags. Most of the power of OpenRefine lies in the ability to combine these different types of facets.

Text facets

If your dataset has a column containing cities or country names, for instance, you will want to see at a glance what the different values are for that field...