From DIYcity

DIYcity Challenge #7: Open Data!
Submitted by John Geraci on 2 April 2009 – 3:40pm.

Lots of city agencies all over the world have data online that is accessible to humans in readable format, yet isn’t accessible to other computers and programs via an API. Some agencies don’t have the means to turn their data into an API, others don’t have the inclination to do so.

Can we help these agencies to open their data?

DIYcity Challenge #7: build a site scraper for the website of a city agency in your city that scrapes data, dumps it into a database, and offers that to everyone in API format.

Do not violate any copyrights for this challenge – please only scrape publicly accessible government data, not data from 3rd party sites.

DIYcity can help host any scraping bots, databases and APIs that come out of this challenge. Or just point us to a dataset you’ve scraped and we’ll make a list in the wiki.

[From DIYcity Challenge #7: Open Data! | DIYcity]