In this recipe, you will learn where to look in order to download the latest release of OpenRefine and how to get it running on your favorite operating system.
First things first: start by downloading OpenRefine from http://openrefine.org/. OpenRefine was previously known as Freebase Gridworks, then as Google Refine for a few years. Since October 2012, the project has been taken over by the community, which makes OpenRefine really open. OpenRefine 2.6 is the first version carrying the new branding. If you are interested in the development version, you can also check https://github.com/OpenRefine.
OpenRefine is based on the Java environment, which makes it platform-independent. Just make sure that you have an up-to-date version of Java running on your machine (available from http://java.com/download) and follow the following instructions, depending on your operating system:
It should be noted that, by default, OpenRefine will allocate only 1 GB of RAM to Java. While this is sufficient to handle small datasets, it soon becomes restrictive when dealing with larger collections of data. In Recipe 7 – going for more memory, we will detail how to allow OpenRefine to allocate more memory, an operation that also differs from one OS to the other.