OpenRefine How-Tos

General help and support with Refine

If you need help getting started with OpenRefine and the GOKb extension, visit our tutorial.

Basic information on using Refine, including some common 'recipes' to transform data is available on the Open Refine wiki at https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine/wiki

There is some useful introductory material which uses library data to demonstrate various functions of Open Refine at http://freeyourmetadata.org

The Open Refine mailing list is active and can often help with advice on how to best use Refine to solve specific problems http://groups.google.com/d/forum/openrefine

The 'How-Tos' below deal with specific tasks/transformations that are relevant to GOKb. Please feel free to add/edit pages if you have permissions to do so.

If you would like to request documentation/advice for some function do one of the following:

• Edit this page and add details of what you need to the 'Requested' list (if you have permissions)
• Add a comment to the page with the details of what you want added (you need to login - if you don't have an account you can create one at https://kis.kuali.org/logins/create)
• Send an email to the GOKb-SME email list GOKB-SME@jiscmail.ac.uk (if you are a member)

How-Tos

Columns

• Column names and requirements
• Working with columns
  

Comparing two sets of data in Refine

• Simple comparison example
• Comparison with titles example
• Comparison using iterative matching example
• Normalising a Title

Dates

• How to format common dates into a correct GOKb date

• DateLastPackageIssue date issues

• Interpreting Seasons as dates

De-duplicating Lists

Expected titles

Exporting a project

Looking up Controlled Values

Rows

• Adding rows
  • Prepend Rows function
  • "Split multi-valued cells" method
• Removing rows

Titles

• Uppercase words in titles

Transformations

• Macros
• Quick Fix Transformations

Requested

• Dealing with multi-package files in Refine