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Starting today, we are sunsetting RefinePro’s OpenRefine hosting. We are not accepting new registration and new subscriptions. Existing users can continue to access the service until the end of their subscription or trial phase.

In September 2015, we submitted the following application to the Knight News Challenge: How might we make data work for individuals and communities? We are cross posting it here for archive. You can also consult it directly on the Knight Challenge website.

In our effort to engage with local OpenRefine community and foster peer-to-peer connections, the latest Toronto OpenRefine Meet-Up (on November 17) focused on actual use cases, presented by OpenRefine user from various backgrounds. The goal to demonstrate how OpenRefine plays in a specific contexts and data environment, rather than drilling down on specific functionality. This article provides a summary of the night and highlight of each talk.

Learn the basics of OpenRefine with our Foundation course available on the tranzform course platform.

Stefan Urbanek when laying the foundation for the school of data program at the Open Knowledge, presented the following Data Processing Pipeline going from:

The main motivation behind RefinePro is being able to commit developer time to OpenRefine (since I am not a developer myself) and have the project leave its stagnant stage. RefinePro motivation isn’t to make millions or get some prestige by stealing other people work – there is faster and less risky way to do that than creating a start-up on a niche market.

Following my article on enabling parallel processing for OpenRefine: Spark vs Akka, I drafted a road map to integrate OpenRefine with Akka.

Andrey from SpazioDati developed Refine on Spark in an attempt to process larger dataset which is good. However it fell short in some areas and I wanted to benchmark it with an other parallelism engine like Akka.

In the two articles of this series of three we have seen how corporations leverage Open Source Software (OSS) to build new solution and how an open source strategy foster in-house and community based innovation. It is a new world for software development and related business-building strategies, a world where even enterprise software projects leverage open source components for their foundation. The freedom to extend or even fork the project to explore new options can lead to unexpected innovation and usage, when done right. Open licenses mean that contributors – including yourself – have no restrictions on tweaking code and tailoring it to match requirements or customizing it to specific needs within an organization or industry. However to ensure continuity and sustainability of the project, the community now need to scale, gain the critical size and drive broad adoption.

In the first article of this series of three on open source strategy, we seen how Open Source Software (OSS) is now part of corporations strategy and the benefit of building an ecosystems. By sharing your code and vision openly you enable other expand your solution, adapt to their specific environment. It is not rare to see unexpected innovation sparking in this process. In this article we will see the steps to create such innovation friendly environment and take example the OpenRefine community.