Three cheers for public data

 
Last Thursday, Amazon launched its Public Data Sets web service. The project hopes to make it easy for developers and researchers to access and use (very) large data sets in their Amazon Web Services applications.

Available data sets include: an annotated form of the Human Genome, a public database of chemical structures, and plenty of US census data. There is one small catch -- Amazon is hosting all of the data for free, but in order to access and download the numbers, you have to be an Amazon Web Services subscriber. Shucks.

Either way, we think its pretty awesome, since we believe that data is most valuable when its out in the open for everyone to see and share. Hip, hip, hooray for public data!