[pbbakkum]

This is a problem close to my heart, thanks for pointing it out. I have a project up at http://commonwealth.io attempting the reduce the barrier to using data like this. Even when the data is accessible, it could be in any format and you have to load it into a DB to get any value.

The idea is to enable real SQL queries directly on data sets, so you don't need to worry about accessibility or how you'll query it. Not much data in it now, and it doesn't solve your immediate problem, but perhaps a better model for storing and representing this data.