Thursday, December 4, 2008

Amazon Launches New Public Dataset Service

Seattle-based Amazon Web Services, Amazon.com's web services arm, said today that it has launched another new service, this time focused on public data sets. According to Amazon, the new "Public Data Sets on AWS" service provides access to a centralized repository of public data, such as U.S. Census databases, 3-D chemical structures, and humane genome information. Amazon said it will host the sets for no charge. The new data will be available from Amazon's EC2 cloud computing service. The public data sets being hosted by Amazon have been available before for download, but have typically taken a large amount of data storage to host and were difficult to access. Amazon said it also hopes to add other data sets, including economic statistics from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and other scientific data sets. Although the data is free, any additional storage that users consume, and compute time on EC2, will cost users Amazon's standard usage rates.