"There's lots of useful data on the internet - crime statistics, government spending, missing kittens. But getting at it isn't always easy. There's a table here, a report there, web pages, PDFs, spreadsheets... And it can be scattered over thousands of different places on the web, making it hard to see the whole picture and the story behind it...ScraperWiki is an online tool to make that process simpler and more collaborative. Anyone can write a screen scraper using the online editor, and the code and data are shared with the world. Because it's a wiki, other programmers can contribute to and improve the code. And, if you're not a programmer yourself, you can request a scraper or ask the ScraperWiki team to write one for you."