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 – clustering similar cells


Thanks to OpenRefine, you don't have to worry about inconsistencies that slipped in during the creation process of your data. If you have been investigating the various categories after splitting the multi-valued cells, you might have noticed that the same category labels do not always have the same spelling. For instance, there is Agricultural Equipment and Agricultural equipment (capitalization differences), Costumes and Costume (pluralization differences), and various other issues. The good news is that these can be resolved automatically; well, almost. But, OpenRefine definitely makes it a lot easier.

The process of finding the same items with slightly different spelling is called clustering. After you have split multi-valued cells, you can click on the Categories dropdown and navigate to Edit cells | Cluster and edit…. OpenRefine presents you with a dialog box where you can choose between different clustering methods, each of which can use various...