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 – installing extensions


While OpenRefine allows you out-of-the-box to add new reconciliation services, these are only services that work in a certain way under the hood. However, there are several other types of services out there, and if you want to use them, you will need to add some functionality to OpenRefine in the form of extensions. So, before we can show you how to add those services, we first have to explain how to install OpenRefine extensions. Not all extensions offer reconciliation services, so this recipe describes the general installation procedure. At the time of writing, several OpenRefine extensions are available, including the following points:

  • The RDF extension by Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), which adds support for RDF export and reconciliation with SPARQL endpoints. We'll explain both terms in the next recipe.

  • The Named-Entity Recognition (NER) extension written by one of the authors of this book, which allows you to extract URLs from full-text...