Using OpenRefine: The Essential OpenRefine Guide That Takes You from Data Analysis and Error Fixing to Linking Your Dataset to the Web - Softcover

Verborgh, Ruben; De Wilde, Max

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783289082 ISBN 13: 9781783289080

Publisher: Packt Pub Ltd, 2013

Synopsis

With this book on OpenRefine, managing and cleaning your large datasets suddenly got a lot easier! With a cookbook approach and free datasheets included, you'll quickly and painlessly improve your data managing capabilities.

Overview

• Create links between your dataset and others in an instant
• Effectively transform data with regular expressions and the General Refine Expression Language
• Spot issues in your dataset and take effective action with just a few clicks

In Detail

Data is supposed to be the new gold, but how can you unlock the value in your data? Managing large datasets used to be a task for specialists, but you don't have to worry about inconsistencies or errors anymore. OpenRefine lets you clean, link, and publish your dataset in a breeze.

Using OpenRefine takes you on a practical tour of all the handy features of this well-known data transformation tool. It is a hands-on recipe book that teaches you data techniques by example. Starting from the basics, it gradually transforms you into an OpenRefine expert.

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.

What you will learn from this book

• Import data in various formats
• Explore datasets in a matter of seconds
• Apply basic and advanced cell transformations
• Deal with cells that contain multiple values
• Create instantaneous links between datasets
• Filter and partition your data easily with regular expressions
• Use named-entity extraction on full-text fields to automatically identify topics
• Perform advanced data operations with the General Refine Expression Language

Approach

The book is styled on a Cookbook, containing recipes - combined with free datasets - which will turn readers into proficient OpenRefine users in the fastest possible way.

Who this book is written for

This book is targeted at anyone who works on or handles a large amount of data. No prior knowledge of OpenRefine is required, as we start from the very beginning and gradually reveal more advanced features. You don't even need your own dataset, as we provide example data to try out the book's recipes.

About this title

About the Author

Ruben Verborgh

Ruben Verborgh is a PhD researcher in semantic hypermedia, and is fascinated by the Web's immense possibilities. He tries to contribute ideas that will maybe someday slightly influence the way the Web changes all of us. His degree in Computer Science Engineering convinced him more than ever that communication is the most crucial thing for IT-based solutions. This is why he really enjoys explaining things to those eager to learn. In 2011, he launched the Free Your Metadata project together with Seth van Hooland and Max De Wilde, which aims to evangelize the importance of putting your data on the Web. This book is one of the assets in this continuing quest.

Ruben currently works at Multimedia Lab, a research group of iMinds, Ghent University, Belgium, in the domains of the Semantic Web, web APIs, and adaptive hypermedia. Together with Seth van Hooland, he's currently writing Linked Data for Libraries, Archives, and Museums, a practical guide for metadata practitioners.

Edition details

• Publisher: Packt Pub Ltd
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1783289082
• ISBN 13: 9781783289080
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 95