The application automatically opens in a new Chrome window.
From here, I grabbed a data dump from one of our external providers.
We work with a lot of providers who are really technologically challenged. I'd love to be able to say, here you are.. here is our API, start pushing your content to us. But in practice they don't even know what their XML feeds do. We need their data, but getting a consistent dataset from them when they seem to change their format regularly is a pain! And when importing only 10 or so items at a time it's excruciatingly painful.
Today I learnt how easy that can be with Google Refine!
This seems, on the surface at least, very similar to what ScraperWiki is trying to do, by converting messy publicly available data in to a more structured format.
Am I correct in that understanding, or did I miss the boat?
Not very impressive for people who work with data sets often and probably have tools like SAS or Excel, but good to know it exists as a free alternative.
As far as I know, Excel has no such comparable tools for data cleanup. Excel doesn't even have built in regexes. On the other hand, Refine is not built for doing calculations. So there's really no comparison except that both programs display data in a tabular format.
Is this worth looking into for someone who already knows perl, R and the unix zoo? Or is it more targetted at people who don't deal with data on a regular basis?
One place where Refine distinguishes itself compared to those tools are its quick visualizations of subsets of the data. In the article the author is able to tell that a column is always blank, and thus worth dropping, but Refine can do a lot more there.
As a data analyst-type-person, I can't recommend enough the use of Google Refine. When someone told me about it, I thought "that's dumb, I would just write a cleaning/regex script and connect to my DB"...but tried it out anyway, because my colleague is a much better power programmer than I am.
That's how good Refine is...it adds an extra, GUI-driven step to the workflow, but it's so well executed that it makes data exploration (and cleaning) effortless.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 69.8 ms ] threadInstallation was a breeze. I couldn't find any instructions, but it was as simple as downloading for Linux, extracting, the running the shell script.
http://code.google.com/p/google-refine/downloads/detail?name...
The application automatically opens in a new Chrome window.
From here, I grabbed a data dump from one of our external providers.
We work with a lot of providers who are really technologically challenged. I'd love to be able to say, here you are.. here is our API, start pushing your content to us. But in practice they don't even know what their XML feeds do. We need their data, but getting a consistent dataset from them when they seem to change their format regularly is a pain! And when importing only 10 or so items at a time it's excruciatingly painful.
Today I learnt how easy that can be with Google Refine!
Tip: GR can have a bit of a wobble from time-to-time, usually restarting the process will sort things out.
It focuses on more mechanical transformations but has the ability to save the steps to a program which you can then use in a process pipeline.
(disclaimer, I haven't played with it in a few months so this is from memory)
Which isn't to say that's a bad idea...
Am I correct in that understanding, or did I miss the boat?
Still unix toolset - awk, grep, sort - beats both for most tasks and huge data sets.
That's when the export/import processing steps feature comes in handy.
Google Refine is nice for cleaning up and pre-processing data files before exporting elsewhere for analysing.
Have a quick look over the screen casts. If you're familiar with those tools you'll map the concepts pretty quickly.
http://code.google.com/p/google-refine/
That's how good Refine is...it adds an extra, GUI-driven step to the workflow, but it's so well executed that it makes data exploration (and cleaning) effortless.
I wrote a tutorial awhile back about how I used it in an investigative reporting project: http://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/using-google-refine-for...