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

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.

Key Features

• 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

Book Description

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.

What you will learn

• 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

Who this book is for

This book is targeted at anyone who works on or handles a large amount of data. No prior knowledge 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.