![\"open-refine\"](\"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/open-refine.png\")
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OpenRefine<\/a> is a wonderful tool my coworkers have been using to clean data for my project at work. Our workflow has been nice and simple: they take a CSV dump from a database, transform the data in OpenRefine, and export it as CSV. I write scripts to detect the changes and update the database with the new data.<\/p>\n We have a need, in the next few months, to reconcile the names of various individuals and organizations with standard “universal” identifiers for them in the Virtual International Authority File<\/a>. The tricky part is that any given name in our system might have several candidates in VIAF, so it can’t be a fully automated process. A human being needs to look at them and make a decision. OpenRefine allows you to do this reconciliation, and also provides an interface that lets you choose among candidates.<\/p>\n Communicating with VIAF is not built in, though. Roderic D. M. Page wrote a VIAF reconciliation service<\/a>, and it’s publicly accessible at the address listed on the linked page (the PHP source code is available here<\/a>). It works very nicely.<\/p>\n I wanted to write my own version for 2 reasons: 1) I needed it to support the different name types in VIAF, 2) I wanted to host it myself, in case I needed to make large numbers of queries, so as not to be an obnoxious burden on Page’s server.<\/p>\n The project is called refine_viaf<\/b> and the source code is available at https:\/\/github.com\/codeforkjeff\/refine_viaf<\/a>. <\/p>\n For those who just want to use it without hosting their own installation, I’ve also made the service publicly accessible at http:\/\/refine.codefork.com<\/a>, where there are instructions on how to configure OpenRefine to use it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" OpenRefine is a wonderful tool my coworkers have been using to clean data for my project at work. Our workflow has been nice and simple: they take a CSV dump from a database, transform the data in OpenRefine, and export it as CSV. I write scripts to detect the changes and update the database with … Continue reading “A VIAF Reconciliation Service for OpenRefine”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,6,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-python","category-user-interface","category-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=394"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":427,"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394\/revisions\/427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/codefork.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}