Sort by multiple criteria

Google Refine sort function allow a combination of several columns to sort by field A and field B. 

In my case, I used this method as a work extract the most recent title posted from a records in a list of radio show (using a timestamp field). As I am not aware for a way to select a specific row within a record, I used the sort function to present the record I wanted to extract at the top my the record group.

Read More

Google Refine + Perl (from around the web)

---

Google Refine + Perl Make Google Refine and Perl transforms one-liners work together using the fetch by url (RESTful API)

Read More

Create records in Google Refine

This short tutorial describe how to create records in Google Refine. For the difference between a row can present a data set in row or record mode (see the difference between the two).

Read More

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.

Read More

Data exploration tutorial with google refine

Recently, Hugh Stimson published a great article: Data Mining My Old Radio Playlists. His post mix tutorials on php scripting, data cleaning with google refine and data analysis with PostgreSQL.

This answer post demonstrate that data analysis is fully doable in google refine using really basic function (I'll be using GREL function only once for the long tail analysis). I guess also this post is a good illustration of my previous post on data exploration using google refine.

Read More

Fusion Table, map multiple items with the same location

When you want to map multiple items with the same location in Fusion Table, only one item is displayed and all the others are ignored. There is several workaround to this  major limitation, and the most common is to change slightly your coordinate (longitude / latitude) so your point will appear close to each other on the map (tip from the google fusion team itself). 

When working with large data set, identifying and manually correcting all records sharing the same location can become time consuming. So I've been looking how to deal with this in Google refine and ends up with this straight forward process.

Read More

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.

Read More