OMG! MY METADATA IS AS FRESH AS THE BACKSTREET BOYS: HOW GOOGLE REFINE CAN UPDATE, CLEAN UP AND

LINK YOUR METADATA TO THE WIDER WORLD

SARAH BETH WEEKS

LIBRARY TECHNOLOGY CONFERENCE 2013

WEEKSS@STOLAF.EDU@RASCALWHALE

Situation: Wanted to match publishers of our books against a list of important Nordic American Publishers (compiled by Penny Huff man) to find materials for our special collections.Problem: Hard to compare when publication info is not controlled:

SAMPLE PROJECT: NORDIC AMERICAN IMPRINTS

Google Refine can “match and merge” messy data filled with:Random, leading or trailing spacesstray punctuationtyposodd capitalization and more!

ANSWER: GOOGLE REFINE!

CREATE YOUR PROJECT USING ANY SPREADSHEET

USE “COMMON TRANSFORMS” TO FIX “WHITESPACE” PROBLEMS IN A SINGLE

CLICK

3. CLEAN UP STRAY CHARACTERS ([].?:) USING “TRANSFORM” AND REGULAR EXPRESSIONS

(OR JUST USE EXCEL FIND AND REPLACE FOR THIS)

4. REPEAT COMMON TRANSFORMS

5. CLUSTER AND EDIT

(THIS IS WHERE THE MAGIC HAPPENS)

FUNCTION 1: FINGERPRINT (MOST RELIABLE)

NGRAM METHOD(STILL RELIABLE: MORE MATCHES BUT LESS RELIABILITY AS YOU DECREASE

NGRAM SIZE)

PHONETIC MATCHING(ESPECIALLY USEFUL WHEN DEALING

WITH TRANSLATED TEXT)

(MORE FALSE MATCHES TO WATCH FOR WITH PHONETIC FUNCTIONS)

NEAREST NEIGHBOR (PPM) MATCHING

(SLOWER AND MORE FALSE MATCHES BUT CATCHES WHAT OTHER METHODS

MISS)

(SET RADIUS HIGHER, BLOCK CHARACTERS LOWER TO GENERATE

MORE MATCHES)

AFTER USING OTHER METHODS, RUN THROUGH FINGERPRINT AND NGRAM

AGAIN

BE AWARE THAT THINGS THAT WEREN’T CLUSTERED WON’T HAVE

BEEN FIXED

6. USE THE TEXT FACET TO SEE ALL UNIQUE VALUES

YOU CAN SCROLL THROUGH THE LIST TO SPOT CHECK FOR

PROBLEMS

CLICK EDIT TO TYPE NEW TEXT FOR ALL CELLS WITH THIS VALUE

OTHER CLEAN-UP WE DID:PUBLISHERS

OTHER CLEAN-UP WE DID:GIFT NOTES

ALSO WORKS FOR NUMBERS/DATES

END RESULT?

Using Google Refine we were able to reduce the 3230 unique values for city (260|a) to just 1153. For publishers (260|b) we went from 11342 unique names for publishers to approximately 6500.

This project helped to identify over 2,000 potential candidates for our Nordic American Imprints collection. (These are still being evaluated).

The controlled publishers, cities of publications and dates will be added to a local 9xx field for faceting in our future special collections discover tool. Users will be able to browse our Nordic American Imprints collection by publisher, city or state.

BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!!LINKED DATA!!!

FREEBASE IS THE DEFAULT SERVICE (WIKIPEDIA-ESQUE DATA OWNED BY GOOGLE)

CHOOSE THE RIGHT “TYPE” AND MOST CELLS WILL BE AUTO-

MATCHED

FOR THE REST CLICK THE OPTIONS TO SEE WHAT EACH REPRESENTS

Then click “Match All Identical Cells” (or double checkmarks) to link all cells with this text to this Freebase topic

OR “SEARCH FOR MATCH” TO BRING UP AN AUTO-FILL LIST TO CHOOSE

FROM

EVEN COOLER: NOW YOU CAN BRING DATA IN FROM FREEBASE!

CHOOSE WHAT INFO YOU WANT TO ADD

THIS NEW DATA IS NOW ADDED TO YOUR SPREADSHEET

Browse the properties at: http://schemas.freebaseapps.com/

TO SEE WHAT COLUMNS (DATA) YOU CAN ADD FROM FREEBASE:

MATCH LOCAL SUBJECT HEADING TO LC (FREEYOURMETADATA.ORG)

Install the RDF Extension for Google Refi ne http://refi ne.deri.ie/

SPARQL Endpointshttp://labs.mondeca.com/sparqlEndpointsStatus/index.htmlCKAN Data Hub: http://datahub.io/dataset/

SPARQL ENDPOINTS

ADD SPARQL-BASED RECONCILIATION SERVICE

Questions?

Link to a public version of this presentation at my (personal) blog:

gardenandalibrary.blogspot.comI’m also happy to take questions by e-mail

weekss@stolaf.edu

THANK YOU!