[BiO BB] RE: [BiO News] Amazon Web Services launches “Public Data Sets on AWS”

[Mike Marchywka]

I'm not entirely sure what the commercial AWS service offers but similar issues
come up in many areas. For example, this is about real estate ( and 
admittedly could use some editing in the NCBI discussion ),


http://files.ots.treas.gov/comments/fddad554-1e0b-8562-eb37-34e416089fee.pdf
 
( RFC is here 
 
http://www.ots.treas.gov/?p=OpenComment&Topic_id=c0316a9e-1e0b-8562-ebd0-1ae5298909e2
 
)
 
but makes the case for free "API" based access to raw data for both
personal usage and "valued added" interface providers, which "AWS"
appears to offer. Or, maybe "weather.com"
which presumably repackages data available at noaa.gov would be a good example too,
 
http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?CityName=Marietta&state=GA&site=FFC&textField1=33.9509&textField2=-84.5411&e=0
 
For personal ad hoc analysis, I'd hate to be constrained by even token fees
if the data can be reasonably made available for free I can write my own analysis locally
and require no support from a commercial service.

I've actually used the census data too and the flat download formats provided
by the census is the perfect format, if you want to look see here for example,
( development tool, not assurance this will be stable),
 
http://www.spottext.com/launcher/db/loc.cfm?action=find&longitude=-81.46277&latitude=33.4375&dimo=.2&dima=.2&lim=50
 
The tiger files are huge and I'm working on an API to present arbitrary SQL to
a remote user ( no forms or html etc).


> To: marchywka at hotmail.com
> Subject: [BiO News] Amazon Web Services launches “Public Data Sets on AWS”
> From: news at bioinformatics.org
> Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2008 20:26:19 -0500
> 
> Bioinformatics.Org News & Commentary
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> Amazon Web Services launches “Public Data Sets on AWS”
> Submitted by Mark Luo; posted on Saturday, December 06, 2008
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> ``Public Data Sets on AWS provides a centralized repository of public data sets that can be seamlessly integrated into AWS cloud-based applications. AWS is hosting the public data sets at no charge for the community, and like all AWS services, users pay only for the compute and storage they use for their own applications. An initial list of data sets is already available, and more will be added soon.
> 
> ``Previously, large data sets such as the mapping of the Human Genome and the US Census data required hours or days to locate, download, customize, and analyze. Now, anyone can access these data sets from their Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and start computing on the data within minutes. Users can also leverage the entire AWS ecosystem and easily collaborate with other AWS users. For example, users can produce or use prebuilt server images with tools and applications to analyze the data sets. By hosting this important and useful data with cost-efficient services such as Amazon EC2, AWS hopes to provide researchers across a variety of disciplines and industries with tools to enable more innovation, more quickly.''
> 
> FOR MORE INFORMATION:
> http://aws.amazon.com/publicdatasets/
> 
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