Public Data Sets on AWS

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Available Public Data Sets on AWS

AWS will continue to add to the available collection of public domain and non-proprietary data sets over time. The data sets currently available are shown below. The Linux/UNIX snapshots are in ISO9660 or EXT3 format and the Windows snapshots are in NTFS format.

You can obtain a full list of data sets in our Public Data Sets resource center.

Here are some examples of popular Public Data Sets:

• Annotated Human Genome Data provided by ENSEMBL
  The Ensembl project produces genome databases for human as well as almost 50 other species, and makes this information freely available.

• Various US Census Databases from The US Census Bureau
  United States demographic data from the 1980, 1990, and 2000 US Censuses, summary information about Business and Industry , and 2003-2006 Economic Household Profile Data.

• UniGene provided by the National Center for Biotechnology Information
  A set of transcript sequences of well-characterized genes and hundreds of thousands of expressed sequence tags (EST) that provide an organized view of the transcriptome.

• Freebase Data Dump from Freebase.com
  A data dump of all the current facts and assertions in the Freebase system. Freebase is an open database of the world’s information, covering millions of topics in hundreds of categories. Drawing from large open data sets like Wikipedia, MusicBrainz, and the SEC archives, it contains structured information on many popular topics, including movies, music, people and locations – all reconciled and freely available.

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How It Works

Select public data sets are hosted on Amazon EC2 for free as Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) snapshots. Amazon EC2 customers can access this data by creating their own personal Amazon EBS volumes, using the public data set snapshots as a starting point. They can then access, modify and perform computation on these volumes directly using their Amazon EC2 instances and just pay for the compute and storage resources that they use. If available, researchers can also use pre-configured Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) with tools like Inquiry by BioTeam to perform their analysis.

To get started using the Public Data Sets on AWS, simply perform these three easy steps:

1. Sign up for an Amazon EC2 account.
2. Launch an Amazon EC2 instance.
3. Create an Amazon EBS volume using the Snapshot ID listed in the catalog above for your chosen snapshot.

The ElasticFox Getting Started Guide provides a simple walkthrough of how to launch an instance and create an Amazon EBS volume using ElasticFox, a convenient FireFox plug-in. Or, see the Amazon EC2 Getting Started Guide.

If you have any questions or want to participate in our Public Data Sets community, please visit our Public Data Sets forum.

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How to Share a Public Data Set on AWS

If you have a public domain or non-proprietary data set that you think is useful and interesting to the AWS community, please submit a request below and the AWS team will review your submission and get back to you. Typically the data sets in the repository are between 1 GB to 1 TB in size (based on the Amazon EBS volume limit), but we can work with you to host larger data sets as well. You must have the right to make the data freely available.

To get started, please fill in the submission form linked here, and a member of our team will contact you regarding your public data set. We will walk you through publishing your data set to the data repository.