Introducing Reconcile-CSV
Recently I spent a week in Tanzania working on education data with the ministry of education (blog post here). One of the problems we faced there were spreadsheets, we liked to merge, without having any unique IDs. I quickly realized we can do this through reconciliation services in OpenRefine. The API and some projects implementing the reconciliation service are described in the OpenRefine wiki. Nevertheless, most of the projects had a ton of requirements or need a database.
I wanted a service that is:
- easy to install and run
- works on top of a CSV file
Because I love Clojure and I already had a fuzzy-matching library at hand, I chose to go down that route. Clojure has the great advantage of being able to generate .jar files including all the dependencies. - thus running the service is a matter of executing a .jar file.
All that was left was implementing the reconciliation API around it. I am proudly introducing reconcile-csv - a reconciliation service, running on your machine without much hassle. See http://okfnlabs.org/reconcile-csv for more details and instructions.
While this might not be the first reconciliation service to be written - I do think by now it’s the easiest to use: you’ll only need java, a CSV file and the .jar provided.
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