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, you have got to know OpenRefine, your new best friend for data profiling, cleaning, transformation, and many other things that you are still to discover. You now have an OpenRefine installation running and you know how to import your data into it by creating a new project and how to export them again after you are done. The mechanisms of rows and columns do not have any secrets for you any longer, and you understand how to navigate in the project history. You have also mastered memory allocation, which allows you to work on larger datasets.

Although it is always important to first have a good overview of what is in your dataset before dirtying your hands, you may now be getting impatient to perform actual changes on your data. If so, you are ready for Chapter 2, Analyzing and Fixing Data, which will move on to teach you the ins and outs of all the basic operations needed to analyze and fix your data.