This is the first beta release of OpenRefine 2.6. It is for testing purposes only and is not intended for production work. Please backup your workspace directory before testing and report any problems that you encounter.
Testing - please especially keep an eye out for strings/labels in the UI which are missing or rendered as undefined
New features:
- shiny new OpenRefine branding
- internationalized UI available in both Italian and English
- a number of small of localization improvements such as support for locale in the toDate() function #729
(if you'd like to help translating for your language, contact us) - better data fidelity for import - it's now possible to turn off all automatic conversions
- improved CSV support, including support for multi-character field separators
- support for the new Freebase v1 APIs released by Google as well as the latest Freebase Suggest 4.3
- better feedback on memory usage and low memory situations when creating projects
- shorter more friendly column names for JSON imports #524
- sorting of large data sets is orders of magnitude faster #738
- almost one hundred bug fixes including fixes for some of the persistently annoying ones like cross() failures #432
- more robust project saving and project recovery -- if you have projects in your workspace which have been renamed .project.corrupted, you may be able to recover some of the data if you rename them back to the standard .project extension
A full list of bugs fixed in this release is available.
INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE WITH GOOGLE REFINE 2.5:
- data directory has been renamed from ./Google/Refine to ./OpenRefine #777
If you run both versions, add a property a definition for refine.data_dir using a line like this in the refine.ini for your Google Refine 2.5 installation
JAVA_OPTIONS=-Drefine.data_dir=/path/to/data/dir
MAC OS X Version Requirement
The Mac kit bundles Java 7 which requires Mac OS X 10.7.3 (Lion) or later. The files are compiled for Java 6 compatibility, so it may be possible to run it by hand using Java 6 from Apple's Software Update, but this is unsupported and not recommended.