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OpenRefine News: November 2015

· 4 min read
Martin Magdinier

Once again welcome to the latest edition of our monthly update. Always exciting to update you on all the new developments that have been happening with OpenRefine, and the community as a whole.

This monthly update will showcase some good tutorials that were written by community members, popular events from November, and some events you can look forward to in December.

New Tutorials and Articles​

Data Wrangling with OpenRefine presentation and use case made at @louislibraries.

Use cases slide for the @lobidOrg made at the SWIB-15: API and reconciliation service with OpenRefine by @fsteeg.

New Article regarding limitations when splitting and joining multi-valued cells in OpenRefine by @MagdMartin.

We found this story really interesting and how @KatieLaGrone and @WPTVTNIELS used OpenRefine to study DUI crashes.

@importio put together an excellent list of all the best big data tools and how to use them. Of course OpenRefine is one of them!

(In Chinese) OpenRefine Course by tkirby including regex, cluster, facet. Slides and Exercise

Development Update​

We received two majors contributions last month. First @k_grons @cora_jr and @roellephant built a new cluster export feature for OpenRefine. Their pull request is under review but you can test it right away from their repository.

@pm5 started a Node.js client library for controlling OpenRefine similar to the existing one in ruby and python.

November Events Recap:​

There was a rather interesting event organized by James Baker hashtag #libraraycarpentry, which was a program for introductory software skills. With better software comes better research, aimed at librarians, four sections three-hour introductory workshop held at the City University London Centre over a period of four weeks.

The numbers they got from the event are amazing to see, the event looks like it was very popular and well executed. The concept behind this workshop was to highlight the needs and requirements of library professionals that do not currently exist, detailed in James Bakers final report of the event. If you want greater details and more information i would strongly suggest having a look at the course content shared on GitHub.

Another popular event that happened last month was the Semantic Web In Libraries Conference (SWIB15) in Hamburg. The SWIB conference was aimed to provide substantial information on LOD developments relevant to the library world and to foster the exchange of ideas and experiences among practitioners. A large number of participants showed up from over 29 different countries really successful meet-up here. Rurik Greenall posted a report on the event itself which is a solid read on his blog.

Students working with OpenRefine at #biodatavis15 recently held in Belgium. Very nice conference here that run a couple of days as well brought via Jan Aerts.

Last month RefinePro organized a new event as part of the Toronto OpenRefine Meet-Up series featuring use case from consultants and civic user. The summary of the Meet-Up can be found here.

Upcoming Events:​

OpenRefine, Mes données à la machine at the Université de Bretagne Occidentale, UBO 08/12/2015

Data Cleaning using OpenRefine in Melbourne, VIC 3010 Australia December Monday 7th.

Cleaning & exploring your data with OpenRefine Intersect Australia Tuesday, 8 December 2015 from 9:30 AM to 1:00 PM (AEDT) The University of Newcastle, NSW.