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 3 – adding a reconciliation service


For this recipe, you need to have installed the RDF extension. If you didn't, have a look at the previous recipe. If you did, you might wonder what the terms RDF and SPARQL mean, as they are used throughout this extension. This will become clear right now.

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a model for data that can be interpreted by machines. While humans can read HTML on the Web, machines do not understand natural language and must therefore be given information in another form. Disambiguation is an important aspect; does Washington refer to the city or the person? And which person? To express this, information in RDF is referred to by URIs or URLs, just like we do with reconciliation in OpenRefine. This is why RDF comes in handy for reconciliation.

The SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language (a recursive acronym for SPARQL) is a language for querying RDF datasources. Traditional relational databases use SQL as a query language; RDF databases...