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I'm not sure what to make of this. On the one hand, the data could be useful.

On the other hand, the data was probably already useful through the world bank's tool. Furthermore, it's reasonable to assume that the data was only released because the people who had to make the final decision were convinced that the effort required to reassemble the data would be prohibitive. The fact that it's now all been released might have a chilling effect on future releases.




Not sure I follow. Do you think the World Bank will now hesitate to release their data because someone scraped it?

They have an open data policy, using CC-BY [1], so unless this scraping effort took data that wasn't covered by that it should be ok I think.

[1] http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/0,,contentMDK:...




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