Category: Open Source

This quarter, AWS released 36 new or updated datasets. As July 16 is Artificial Intelligence (AI) Appreciation Day, the AWS Open Data team is highlighting three unique datasets that are analysis-ready for AI. What will you build with these datasets?

Performance Dashboard on AWS is an open source solution in the AWS Solutions Library designed by AWS experts to help organizations build, deploy, and maintain customizable dashboards to communicate the data-driven performance of public sector services. After this initial release, the Government Transformation Team (GTT) at AWS enlisted the help of the UK’s Digital Accessibility Centre (DAC), LevelAccess, and an internal AWS accessibility team to conduct accessibility audits to help our product team identify possible accessibility opportunities within the application.

The AWS Open Data Sponsorship Program makes high-value, cloud-optimized datasets publicly available on AWS. Through this program, customers are making over 100PB of high-value, cloud-optimized data available for public use. As April 22 is Earth Day, the AWS Open Data team wanted to highlight some new datasets from our geospatial and environmental communities of practice, as well as the other new or updated datasets available now on the Registry of Open Data on AWS and also discoverable on AWS Data Exchange.

In 2020, Meta introduced the Daylight Map Distribution, which combines OpenStreetMap (OSM) data with quality and consistency checks from Daylight mapping partners to create a no-cost, stable, and simple-to-use global map. This blog post provides a brief overview of OSM and Daylight followed by a step-by-step tutorial using five real-world examples. We combine the powerful query capabilities of Amazon Athena from with the feature-rich Daylight OSM data to demonstrate a typical OSM data analysis workflow.

As part of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI), AWS invited Seán Lynch, the founder of OpenLitterMap, to share how AWS technologies and open data are helping to solve global challenges like biodiversity loss and plastic pollution with citizen science. Solutions like OpenLitterMap help unlock the potential that a global abundance of technology has for the collection and dissemination of pertinent data that is an instrumental part of positive social change.

As part of the Registry of Open Data on AWS, AWS invited Alexander Rey, creator of Pirate Weather, to share how AWS technologies and open data are supporting his efforts to provide a no cost and open weather forecast API.

Today, the winners of the first Future of Government Awards were announced. The Future of Government Awards is a program recognizing the people and projects leading public sector digital transformation around the world. We received more than 150 nominations from 52 countries across three categories for this year’s awards. In this blog post, meet the winners and learn their stories.

Nominations are now open for the Future of Government Awards, a new global awards program to recognize the people and projects leading the digital transformation of governments around the world. The Future of Government Awards program seeks to celebrate the hidden public sector heroes who work tirelessly to modernize their governments to improve citizen services. The awards champion innovative technology solutions that the public sector has created and shared—as well as the stories of government organizations that have successfully adapted and reused them. Nominate a public sector digital transformation hero today.

In 2017, the Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation (ALSF) founded the Childhood Cancer Data Lab (Data Lab) to address an important gap in the pediatric cancer field: vast amounts of accumulated data were not being put to use at scale. To address this gap, the Data Lab used AWS to build refine.bio, an openly available collection of normalized bulk gene expression data, to make public datasets interoperable and reusable.

In my time working for the UK government’s Digital Marketplace as the service manager, I saw first-hand the benefits of open source in government. Combined with transparent processes, using open source solutions helped streamline digital project execution, build trust with constituents and the global community, and save time and money. Now, as the senior manager of government services (GovServices) at AWS, and as a teacher for the AWS Institute Executive Education Program, I want to share best practices for government leaders looking to use open source solutions.