Amazon Launches Public Data Sets To Spur Research

turnkeylinux writes "Amazon just launched its Public Data Sets service (home). The project encourages developers, researchers, universities, and businesses to upload large (non-confidential) data sets to Amazon — things like census data, genomes, etc. — and then let others integrate that data into their own AWS applications. AWS is hosting the public data sets at no charge for the community, and like all of AWS services, users pay only for the compute and storage they consume with their own applications. Data sets already available include various US Census databases, 3-D chemical structures provided by Indiana University, and an annotated form of the Human Genome from Ensembl."

Comments

Uhg...

[Anonymous Coward]

This discovery is not a reasoned conclusion but an inward disclosure. Nevertheless, our logical minds demand an explanation. We want to grasp our interior problem conceptually. Later we may understand that our recognition of life's meaninglessness does not arise from realizing that the human race will someday end or that everything we do will eventually be lost or that all our little goals and projects ultimately add up to nothing. Such 'explanations of meaninglessness' we offer ourselves allow our minds to accept what our spirits already know. Existential meaninglessness is a futile sense that arises from within. There is no rational way to convince ourselves that life is meaningless. Attack our life-illusions as we may, we will only be convinced if deep within ourselves we already sense our futility and emptiness.

Sounds good

[horza]

How many developers here have had to hunt around for a list of countries to populate a select box? Or chained select boxes for country -> county/state -> town? How nice would it be to have a central repository where you can download all (in any mixed selection of languages) in cvs/xml/etc?

Phillip.