Way to look up "short names" from project titles?

Apologies in advance if this is the wrong forum, or if this question has already been asked, but I'm having trouble finding info about it.

Basically, I need a way to convert long names of projects into the "short names" I can use with http://updates.drupal.org/release-history, and was hoping there's a better way than parsing the html of http://drupal.org/node/206666. To that end, I'm curious how that page is populated, or if there's a way to get the same info in a machine-readable format. Even better would be an http request that would return the short-name of a project given the human-readable name, if such a thing exists.