[DDI-SRG] Amazon Public Datasets

[I-Lin Kuo]

On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 9:20 AM, Pascal Heus <pascal.heus at gmail.com> wrote:

>  I-Lin:
> thanks for pointing this out. I've just tried and successfully accessed the
> census 2000 public data. Note that you need an Amazon account and run a
> virtual machine on their cloud infrastructure. This is not particularly
> expensive (as low as $.10/hour) but is not trivial for the casual user.
> Nonetheless, this is a very interesting development.
>

It may get to be trivial. Mathematica and MATLAB now have the ability to
compute on the cloud, but I haven't seen any mention that they can also
access Amazon Public Datasets

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/11/mathematica-on-amazon-ec2.html
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/11/parallel-comput.html


>
> I think this could also be an opportunity to approach Amazon and educate
> them (and potentially the underlying data providers) about metadata
> practices. This could be a good marketing channel for DDI (like if Amazon
> could point  to the standard as a best practice). I'll be exploring this
> more through ODaF and other projects I'm involved with.
>

I agree that it's a golden opportunity. It seems to me that one of the major
barrier to having the cloud instances access the APD's in an automated
fashion is the lack of metadata describing the structure of the variables in
the dataset.


>
> best
> Pascal
>
> I-Lin Kuo wrote:
>
> FYI: This might be of interest to the group
>
>
> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/12/paging-researchers-analysts-and-developers.html
>
> --
> I-Lin Kuo
>
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>


-- 
I-Lin Kuo
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