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So I'm on ProPublica's web team -- the organization mentioned in the first video -- and we deal with the types of messy data Refine is made for on a day to day
by thejefflarson 16y ago
So I'm on ProPublica's web team -- the organization mentioned in the first video -- and we deal with the types of messy data Refine is made for on a day to day basis.
We've been using it pretty much daily for about 5 months now and cleaning messy government data used to be time consuming and destructive, with google Refine it's so easy and fast to join, cleanup and do rudimentary analysis on said data.
It especially shines when you have to merge many disparate data sets into one. My colleague, Dan Nguyen, did just that for our Dollars for Doctors app:
http://projects.propublica.org/docdollars/ http://projects.propublica.org/docdollars/
and he scraped the data from reports like this:
http://www.pfizer.com/responsibility/working_with_hcp/payments_report.jsp http://www.pfizer.com/responsibility/working_with_hcp/paymen...
(one company even put the disclosures up as a flash movie).
Of course we could write scripts, use grep/awk/sed or import it into a database, but Refine is really it. I encourage you to give it a try if you have questionable data you'll need to clean.
- poincare 16y agoHow do you guys make money? Edit: I see that you are a nonprofit organization from your "About" page.
- thejefflarson 16y agoYeah, non-profit, mostly foundation grants.
- nswanberg 16y agoThanks for your work. How did you deal with the Flash content? Decompile the source code? Did you encounter tabular PDF data? If so, did you find a good solution? Also, have you or your colleagues had any contact with the Wolfram Alpha team? It seems like your organizations have similar data curation goals. http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2010/10/the-emerging-computation-revolution-a-talk/ http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2010/10/the-emerging-computat...
- thejefflarson 16y agoI didn't grab the flash content, but if I remember correctly, it was a flash movie that wrapped a PDF that Dan then OCRed and cleaned up with Refine. The coolest part was that the pdf was in grid form, so Dan wrote an ImageMagick script that split it into individual cells and then OCRed each cell (for better results). EDIT: We haven't had any contact with Wolfram|Alpha but maybe we should reach out.
- brown9-2 16y agoWould you and your team be willing to write up a quick intro or howto or article about how you're using the tool? Some real-life scenarios and examples might be very useful. Also, you guys do great work - keep it up!
- thejefflarson 16y agoI think we have 2 posts in the hopper about it, keep an eye on the nerd blog: http://www.propublica.org/nerds http://www.propublica.org/nerds