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 1 – reconciling values with Freebase


When you want to transform your cell values from simple strings to URLs, different choices are possible. After all, a given concept can be identified with many URLs as there are many pages on the Web about the same topic. This need not be a problem as long as each URL unambiguously identifies a single concept. However, we must choose which URL we want to use. On the Web, there are many databases of concepts, the most well-known being Wikipedia. In addition to databases for humans, there are also several databases targeted at machines. One example is Freebase, a collaborative knowledge base in which machine-readable facts about virtually every topic are stored.

Note

Before OpenRefine was called Google Refine, it was owned by Freebase creator MetaWeb and called Freebase Gridworks. As a tool for manipulating large datasets, it fitted nicely in the Freebase philosophy of making structured data available.

Therefore, we will reconcile our cell values with...