Tag: open data

Where will the next pandemic-causing virus come from? The answer to this pressing question is locked away in the immense diversity of DNA carried around by life on Earth. A research team located at the Institut Pasteur, a Paris-based leading international research organization, plans to break into that vault of knowledge with IndexThePlanet. Read this post to learn more about the project, which aims to index the DNA of all living organisms, identify previously unknown viruses species, and create a DNA search engine.

The Natural History Museum (NHM) in London is a world-class visitor attraction and a leading science research center. NHM and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have partnered up to transform and accelerate scientific research by bringing together a broad range of biodiversity and environmental data types in one place for the first time. In an earlier post, we discussed NHM’s overall vision for using open data in combination with large-scale compute, data systems, and machine learning (ML) to create the Planetary Knowledge Base (PKB), a knowledge graph of global biodiversity. In this post, we focus on the underlying services and architecture that comprise the PKB.

The potential of open data to transform governance and public services is immense, but realizing this potential requires overcoming common obstacles. In this post, we will explore best practices and solutions for Canadian public sector organizations seeking to use the cloud for open data, specifically examining how Amazon Web Services (AWS) can enable open data success.

The Climate Risk Research Foundation is a nonprofit that supports data-driven climate research. Their goal is to help decision-makers identify the potential impact and magnitude of climate-related risks and develop possible mitigation strategies. We chatted with the organization’s chairman, Brendan Reilly, to learn how its Sustainable Africa Initiative (SAI) is empowering agricultural experts in Nigeria to analyze climate risk models on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to prevent future food insecurity in their local communities.

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Open Data Sponsorship Program makes high-value, cloud-optimized datasets publicly available on AWS. Through this program, customers are making more than 100 petabytes (PB) of high-value, cloud-optimized data available for public use. This past quarter, AWS released 21 new or updated datasets. What will you build with these datasets?

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) wants to build and modernize a global weather framework with WMO Information Systems (WIS) 2.0 to enable and democratize unified access to critical, up-to-date weather data across the world. The WIS 2.0 system and the global cache provide a single point of access to improve the speed and accuracy with which forecasts can be generated while decreasing the time and capital requirements. This post describes the value of a global weather cache as well as the design and architecture for building the WIS 2.0 global weather cache on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Governments encourage public sector organizations, businesses, and citizens to embrace digital technologies and practices through a range of incentives. These incentives standardize processes and motivate behaviors that achieve the objectives of these initiatives in a way that can be sustained over time. This post, written by an Amazon Web Services (AWS) government transformation advisor, highlights 10 ways that governments use incentives to accelerate successful digital transformation. 

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.

It should be simple to build digital platforms that offer people reliable, clear ways to access government services such as healthcare, business registration, and welfare payments. Cloud technology makes it possible for every service to be simple, reliable, scalable, adaptable, and secure. Public sector agencies need to be able to access the cloud, and they do so through public procurement processes. Procurement’s role in supporting modern, digital services for governments is the subject of a report from the Open Data Institute (ODI) and Open Contracting Partnership (OCP).

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.