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OpenRefine News: September 2015

· 4 min read
Martin Magdinier

We are thrilled to share with you some updates from our end, new and exciting developments that have been happening with the community in September, the buzz around the new online OpenRefine Foundation course.

New Course and Article​

RefinePro launched the new Online OpenRefine Foundation Course, to assist in the learning of basic data science by providing structure and direction to the students. This course lets you learn the basics of OpenRefine and data manipulation in only 7 hours. There are a total of 23 instructional videos and 7 hands-on labs split into 5 challenging lessons.

Rob Worthington wrote an interesting and content filled article this month, on how to clean up messy data using OpenRefine. Great step by step tutorial to find, remove duplicates, group similar data and lots more for new users.

In his latest tutorial, Tony Hirst shows how to convert Spreadsheet Rows to Text Based Summary Reports Using OpenRefine

#####In German
Good article about @OpenRefine and the handling of large amounts of data released, by Alexander Witzigmann.

In Mandarin​

Really interesting to see how the community had come a long way and now the reach is on a global scale. Check @tzangms using OpenRefine to show how you can use facets and filters.

##Development Update

Andrey at @Fusepool release of a new OpenRefine binary with an RDF extension, get it here: https://github.com/fusepoolP3/OpenRefine/releases/tag/2.6-beta.2-rdf

The OpenRefine core development team finished to close the issue related to the 2.6 release and prepare a new Release Candidate in the coming weeks. Keep an eye on the developer mailing list for any announcement.

A big thanks to nestorjal rudygt and nachomezzadra for helping with the Spanish translation of OpenRefine. It will be part of the 2.6 release.

Thank you also to mgalushka and jackyq2015 for their merged pull request through September.

September Event​

Data Science Training 4 Librarians (DST4L)​

In September the Data Science Training 4 Librarians (DST4L) initially organized by Harvard Library moved to Copenhagen at the Technical University of Denmark for a three days sessions. The workshop started with a full day on OpenRefine with Simon Hengchen (@_shengche), Raphael Hubain ((@rHubain)) and Martin Magdinier ([@Martin Magdinier](https://twitter.com/Martin Magdinier)) with support via twitter by the rest of the community.

Great support and help all around, lots on hands on deck. Whenever people required assistance, the community rallied and provided solutions.

@PittLibraries The University of Pittsburgh had a good workshop on how to refine data using @OpenRefine.

Sharing knowledge on @OpenRefine workshop happening in Argentina. Really good to see that no matter where you are, you have someone knowledgable of OpenRefine to the community.

Up Coming Workshop and Events​

Linked Open Data in Libraries Archives and Museums (LODLAM) services as a borderless network of enthusiasts, technicians, professionals and any number of other people who are interested in or working with Linked Open Data pertaining to galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. Currently looking for workshop leaders that can run various conferences throughout 2015-16 teaching LODLAM, if you have time and the knowledge this would help a lot of people.

Introduction to OpenRefine at Central PA Open Source Conference 2015-10-17 by Heather Myers. Data is always a hot topic, this conference is to educate and talk about cleaning this data. Increased demand for this product leads to more and more workshops, which is really good to see.

DVS Workshop: OpenRefine: Data Mining and Transformations, Text Normalization Oct 20, 2015 at Duke University.