Setting government data free with ScraperWiki

from programmable web:

Civic minded hackers from all over the world recently organized themselves for action as a part of the International Open Government Hackathon. The team from Portland, Oregon decided to make use of a platform called ScraperWiki that can grab data from government websites and turn into more consumable formats via the ScraperWiki API....

The ScraperWiki work highlights a problem for governments that want to make data available to the public. Some data is currently available in obscure formats or is locked in HTML pages that cannot easily be consumed by web applications.

“ScraperWiki is a great way to demonstrate to governments that programmers will put in work to clean up messy data, in whatever format it is released. the more imporant issue is authorizing the release of the datasets, not worrying about what format they are released in,” said event organizer Max Ogden.

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