Using facet to cluster a subset of your data when you have a large number of rows in OpenRefine?

You sometimes when working in OpenRefine have to deal with a large data set that refer to the same entity (person, city, book or any other entries) but using different spelling. When working with a large data set the clustering function can become unresponsive, due to the amount of computing done in order to run the different algorithms.


In this tutorial we will see how you can create subset of records to cluster using facets to better manage the compute load on your machine. If you want to cluster your full data set, you just need to run the cluster function on the different subset created with your facet.

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Parsing Apache log using OpenRefine

Recently I was looking for a quick way to explore some apache log file. I didn't want to set up any software and I wanted to analyze some very precise path for a specific user, or what happen after a specific error. So I thought about OpenRefine and its parsing capabilities.

The recipe doesn't replace an analytical tool to understand your traffic but help to go behind the curtain and drill down to analyze specific IP address or user, type of error code and patterns

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Cleaning Date with Google Refine (from around the web)

Basic tutorial to clean up some date using OpenRefine. Great example of well structure GREL syntax to build complex transformation.

Read the full article on Hermanes Barbara's blog. 

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Google Refine Workshop (from around the web)

This tutorial / exercise will walk you through all google refine main functionality. Through it's exercise so you can get your hand on quickly!

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Replace month name by month number

An other quick JSON code to cut and past in your project and gain some time. This one replace all English month by their number so January becomes 01 ; February 02 and so on. It is based on the function replace and will avoid you to repeat the same action 12 times. Here a simple replace in bloc note (to update your column name) and apply and the trick is done.

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