OpenRefine I: Cleaning Messy Data with Ease

This presentation was given during the WiNoDa winter school, a five-day intensive course on the topic of Research with Natural Science Collections. Data, Quality, and Methods from 24-28 November 2025. Organization: German Federation for Biological Data e.V. (GFBio) with support from the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin (MfN), German Archaeological Institute (DAI), Vernetzungs- und Kompetenzstelle Open Access Brandenburg (VuK) Abstract: OpenRefine is a tool to clean tabular data and that runs on one’s own computer and can be used via the browser. In this hands-on, we will first get familiar with the tool by taking a look at the basic functionalities such as Facets & Filtering and automated transformations before going deeper into the more complex features, such as Clustering & Merging and calling external services. This talk is aimed both at novice and experienced users of OpenRefine, so no previous experience with the tool or knowledge of programming languages is required but might be advantages for the later and more complex features. Dataset(s) to use (source, license; note any sensitivity): Dedicated training dataset: a subset of the BGBM Herbarium, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14918375