This is the RefinePro knowledge base about OpenRefine. We build it over the years, and keep adding to it. From great tutorials and how-to, to handy GREL expressions and links to external resources, you will find here one of the most comprehensive list of resources to learn OpenRefine.

For a comprehensive documentation you should refer to the official OpenRefine wiki.

Don't where to get started? Search for a specific function below, or read our most popular article from the right side menu.

5.10.12

Open Refine Survey

The survey is now closed. For archive purpose please find a copy of the questions below. Thanks to all the participants.

3.10.12

From Freebase Gridworks to Google Refine and now OpenRefine

Yesterday David Huynh announced that Google will soon stop its active support of Google Refine and count of community to get more involved to growth Refine.

Refine is already a mature data cleaning tool, this change in leadership will be a major challenge for the tool continuity. But first I'd like to clarify what I have read on twitter yesterday night. Google Refine has always been an open source tool and anyone can commit changes, develop an extension or update the wiki.

Through this post I'd like to give my insight on the reason of this decision and what will be the short terms consequences of it.


Grabbing Twitter Search Results into Google Refine And Exporting Conversations into Gephi (from around the web)

Grabbing Twitter Search Results into Google Refine And Exporting Conversations into Gephi 

This neat tutorial explained how to import data directly from the twitter API at the project creation stage using JSON language. The second part of the tutorial explains how to prepare the data to import the in Gephi for data visualization purpose.

via Delicious 

29.9.12

Use Google Refine to clean your data for Fulcrum (from around the web)

Use Google Refine to clean your data for Fulcrum

Fulcrum allow to create location-based data collection apps and deploy them to your mobile device. This tutorial show how to use google refine to take advantages of the data you have collected using fulcrum

via Delicious http://docs.fulcrumapp.com/guides/cleaning-up-data-with-google-refine/

10.9.12

Error: smartSplit error: Un-terminated quoted field at end of CSV line

I am a big fan of the smartSplit function. It is really easy to understand and help to extract quickly part of a string based on any character. However if while using the smartSplit function a cells contains a double quote - " - sign, google refine will return the following error message
Error: smartSplit error: Un-terminated quoted field at end of CSV line

Here is my work around.

5.9.12

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!

Data Journalism Workshop - New York (from around the web)

Google Hangout of HHNew York presenting Google Refine