Amazon.com recently released its Public Data Sets service for applications hosted on Amazon’s EC2 compute platform.

According to Amazon:

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.

Initial data sets include the entire set of US census data for the last 30 years, plus US labor and business statistics and even data from the Human Genome project.

This kind of service is very promising to see – and it is in the truest spirit of the web, giving anyone that needs it full access to a wealth of data that can be examined and re-used in new and creative ways.  The only problem, though, is that the way the data is presented today is really aimed at developers, and there’s currently no services to help chart the results from data.  Of course, on the other hand, that does leave the door wide open for a clever third party to offer value-add services.

In case you have a public data set you’d like to share, Amazon would be happy to host it – anywhere from 1 GB to 1 TB of data.  I’d offer them my Outlook personal folders file since it’s now about 1.2 GB, but I doubt anyone could compute anything useful from that, except perhaps how many emails I routinely neglect to read.

Filed under: Cloud Computing, Consumer Web