Documentation For Users

Documentation hub for users

Where to start?

• How to install and run (UpgradingTo2p0 upgrading instructions)
• How to use
• A Google Chrome extension for GitHub-Wiki-Search will help you search our wiki.

Love it so much?

• Join in with the development or help spread the meme about OpenRefine.
• Get the development version so you can play with all the latest and greatest features, but if you are not afraid of bugs.

Feature Areas

Essential: These are the features you'd use 80% of the time when you use Refine. They help you clean up your data, extend it, and export it out for other tools to consume.

• Importing
• Filtering / faceting
• Editing:
  • Editing cells, editing cells by Clustering
  • Editing columns, creating columns by Extending data
  • Editing rows
  • Understanding expressions
  • Understanding regular expressions
• Exporting
• History (undo/redo)

Reconciliation: You can use the "reconciliation" support in Refine to link text names in your data to database identifiers (also known as database keys, IDs). By connecting your data with other databases, you get more value out of your data.

• Reconciliation
• Data sources
• Extending Data - Calling Web Services
• Extending Data - Using Freebase NOW DEPRECATED FUNCTIONALITY

Uploading to Freebase: NOW DEPRECATED FUNCTIONALITY If you reconcile against Freebase, you can then align your data with Freebase's schemas using Schema Alignment dialogs and load your data into Freebase. For more information on Freebase data loading, see the Refinery project.

• Schema Alignment

Extensions: Add even more features to Refine by installing extensions.

• Installing Extensions
• Extensions that we know about

Recipes and worked examples

For complicated tasks that are commonly done, just follow recipes that other folks have discovered and written up. A recipe is just a sequence of steps, and tips and tricks.

• Recipes (like removing duplicate row values, etc.)

and there are full recipes:

• Geocoding - translating street addresses to lat/lng coordinates
• Fetching URLs From Web Services - grabbing from the Web more data related to the data you already have
• Web Scraping & Extracting items from HTML pages
• Recipe Apache Logs

Many worked examples that illustrate project flow and the logic of using OpenRefine are collected under External Resources

Reference

Glossary of Terms

Expressions

• Variables
• Jython
• General Refine Expression Language (GREL)
  • Controls
  • Functions
    • Boolean functions
    • String functions
    • Array functions
    • Math functions
    • Date functions
    • Other functions

External Sites

While there's a lot of information in this wiki, there's plenty more online too. Here are some notable sites,

• RefinePro Knowledge Base for OpenRefine
• Tony Hirst's blog
• Martin Magdinier's blog
• Rod Whiteley's GREL Quick Reference (PDF)
• Yours? Let us know!

And of course searching online.