Google refine ; JSON and my notepad or how to write script in google refine

One of the nice thing about google refine is that every action you do generate a JSON code. If we want to do a comparison with Excel, the JSON code generated can be compared to record a macro. The sweet spot of Google Refine is that you don't need to click on the record button, it keep track of all your actions automatically and that can be easily exported for back up or editing purpose.

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Field format change accidentally to Number and how to add leading 0

By inadvertence one can transform quickly a field containing number in a text format to number format. This mainly happen during the project creation (import) or when creating new column. This conversion to number can lead to a loss of data like leading 0. Here is how to get them back and avoid this to happen again.

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Difference between a record and a row

Google refine make a clear distinction between a row and a record. We will see what's the difference between the two and advantages to works in records mode.

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facet by facet count

Google refine offers the possibilities to facet by name or choice count. This can be useful to focus an analysis or transformation only on value having more than twenty records for example.

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Sort facet by name using toTitlecase(value) expression

When using the text facet option, google refine, sort all available value either by choice count or by name. When sorting by name, all values will be sorted by number first and then by alphabetical order (capital first and then lower case) into something like this:

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Fetch City and Province / State based on the postal code

In the US, Canada and UK postal code are pretty good code to retrieve information on a location. In this tutorial we will use the yahoo place finder API to add geographical content to a data set based on the postal code. This tutorial can be easily turned around and used to run a query based on a  latitude and longitude (see the end of this post).

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Reconcile against open corporates database

Here is a great video tutorial on reconciliation. It also introduce Open Corporates, an reconciliation source that contains more than 26 millions companies across 31 jurisdiction.

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Use google refine to navigate data solely (facet, filter, flag)

Google refine can also be used to solely navigate and explore data without editing them. I find it very useful to explore large data-set thanks to its good user interface, this avoid to develop a specific one to visualize data. In this post I will present the three mains option to interact with the data: facet, text filer and flags.

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Google Refine 2.0 Training video

In this video you will learn to:

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Full Tutorial by David Huynh

Download a 17 pages tutorial on google refine
by David Huynh

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Google refine presentation (video)

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