Journey to the open data jungle with OpenRefine, CartoDB, Leaflet and Javascript

Playing around with data is not an easy task. There’s no secret formula for successfully finding your way through a bunch of pdf, csv, excel, APIs or whatever else you might have to deal with. There’s not even a single tool that could help you through the whole process, on the contrary, you’ll have to spend some time learning and trying out different techniques.

In this series of articles we will take a look at a couple of really mind-blowing tools. We will use google contacts process them with OpenRefine, then we will geolocate each contact using google map web service API. After that we will import it into CartoDB to expose it as a web service API, and finally, with some Javascript magic we will use leaflet to browse our contacts on a map.