Scraping is where you run a program to extract structured data from web pages, and web scrapers could be called the unsung heroes of data liberation. The OpenAustralia Foundation is announcing a new Scraping Platform called Morph.io

You can write scripts on Morph using Python, Ruby or PHP to collects information from web pages and writes it to an SQLite database in its working directory.The scraper code is kept in a repository on GitHub which is linked to the scraper on Morph. The resulting data is stored in a database that you can query through an API. Or you can just download all the data as JSON or as a CSV (you can import into a spreadsheet) or just download a whole binary SQLite database.