Tag: Open Data for Public Good

The Natural History Museum in London is a world-class visitor attraction and a leading science research center. NHM and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have worked together to transform and accelerate scientific research by bringing together a broad range of UK biodiversity and environmental data types in one place for the first time. In this post, the first in a two-part series, we provide an overview of the NHM-AWS project and the potential research benefits.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is supporting AirGradient, a manufacturer of affordable and accurate air quality monitors, to launch an air quality tracking program with Mechai Bamboo School in Thailand. The program—which will see 100 monitors donated to the school and its partners, part of a wider donation of 200 monitors from AWS to non-government organisations across Asia via AirGradient—will teach students about the science of air quality, the consequences of air pollution, and how to use the monitors.

The National Institute on Aging Genetics of Alzheimer’s Disease Data Storage Site (NIAGADS DSS), powered by AWS, is a genomic database that provides access to publicly available datasets for Alzheimer’s disease and related neuropathologies. Created to make Alzheimers-genetics knowledge more accessible to researchers, NIAGADS has genomics data on 172,701 samples from 98 datasets and is now 1.3 petabytes (PB) in total size. NIAGADS is creating a system that promotes scientific discovery through data sharing with a large cadre of institutions.

The NYUMets team, led by Dr. Eric Oermann at NYU Langone Medical Center, is collaborating with AWS Open Data, NVIDIA, and Medical Open Network for Artificial Intelligence (MONAI), to develop an open science approach to support researchers to help as many patients with metastatic cancer as possible. With support from the AWS Open Data Sponsorship Program, the NYUMets: Brain dataset is now openly available at no cost to researchers around the world.

Learn how federal agencies are enacting new public access policies for data sharing, and how you can use AWS to prepare your research to meet these new data management and sharing requirements.

The AWS Open Data Sponsorship Program makes high-value, cloud-optimized datasets publicly available on AWS. This quarter, we released 44 new or updated datasets including satellite imagery over Africa, a large-scale climate ensemble, and product listings with 3D renderings. Learn how you can put these open datasets to work.

This week, the bipartisan Open, Permanent, Electronic, and Necessary (OPEN) Government Data Act officially became law in the United States, requiring that non-sensitive data produced by US federal agencies be made publicly available in non-propriety and machine-readable formats by default. We have long supported this legislative proposal since it was first introduced in 2016, and commend both the Congressional leaders and the Administration for their commitment to making open data a priority.

The AWS Institute interviewed Natalie Evans Harris, co-founder and CEO of BrightHive and former senior policy advisor to the US Chief Technology Officer in the Obama administration. Harris founded the Data Cabinet, a federal data science community of practice with over 200 active members across more than 40 federal agencies, co-led a cohort of federal, nonprofit, and for-profit organizations to develop data-driven tools through the Opportunity Project, and established the Open Skills Community through the Workforce Data Initiative. She also led an analytics development center for the National Security Agency (NSA) that served as the foundation for NSA’s Enterprise Data Science Development program and became a model for other intelligence community agencies.

Sharing data requires more than just making it available for download or creating an API to access it. In many ways, sharing data is similar to shipping a software product. Just like software; data is made up of digital information; it requires documentation; it will be used by groups of users who may require support; and it may become vital to those users’ work. Another common characteristic of software is that it often gets updated over time as software developers learn from their users and adapt to new technologies.

As open data policies become commonplace, it is worth examining the history and value of open data, and discuss why we share it in the cloud. The idea of sharing data dates back at least to the 1950s, when the International Council of Scientific Unions established World Data Centers to facilitate sharing of data among scientists. In recent years, governments have created open data policies that require government agencies to share data with the public.