Using OpenRefine

Foreword

At the time I joined Metaweb Technologies, Inc. in 2008, we were building up Freebase in earnest; entity by entity, fact by fact. Now you may know Freebase through its newest incarnation, Google's Knowledge Graph, which powers the "Knowledge panels" on www.google.com.

Building up "the world's database of everything" is a tall order that machines and algorithms alone cannot do, even if raw public domain data exists in abundance. Raw data from multiple sources must be cleaned up, homogenized, and then reconciled with data already in Freebase. Even that first step of cleaning up the data cannot be automated entirely; it takes the common sense of a human reader to know that if both 0.1 and 10,000,000 occur in a column named cost, they are ...