Looking at the comments, most people don't understand what this is.<p>In the geospatial industry, there are many organizations that produce free open data.<p>For example the NAIP image data comes USDA and has been paid for by the US govt so the city/state can used it for agriculture - hence why the images are not just RGB, but they also include an infrared band so they can be used for agriculture algorithms like NDVI results. For that particular dataset the license is very liberal. In case you are curious about that particular problem, you can find more info here: <a href="https://www.fsa.usda.gov/programs-and-services/aerial-photography/imagery-programs/naip-imagery/" rel="nofollow">https://www.fsa.usda.gov/programs-and-services/aerial-photog...</a><p>The problem with dealing with datasets of this size is that just the mere collection and storage of it, is a problem of resources. This AWS link here is saying that they have grabbed all these datasets from various govt and non-profits and are hosting them in raw form so you can use them. Because the data comes from so many different institutions, the license is different - but practically speaking super liberal.<p>It is not competing with any previous commercial service from any vendor, nor it is meant to be a solution of any kind... Just big public spatial datasets hosted at AWS.
How does this compare to other offerings like Google Earth Engine[1], GCP Landsat[2], or GCP Sentinel-2[3]?<p>[1] <a href="https://earthengine.google.com/" rel="nofollow">https://earthengine.google.com/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/public-datasets/landsat" rel="nofollow">https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/public-datasets/landsa...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/public-datasets/sentinel-2" rel="nofollow">https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/public-datasets/sentin...</a>
In case you don't scroll all the way down, there's a list of articles and video's titled "Use cases" at the bottom of the page which appear to cover (at least) how some of this data has been used.
> and identifies the people, locations, organizations, counts, themes, sources, emotions, counts, quotes, images and events driving our global society every second of every day.<p>They're really serious about counting, aren't they.
I'd like to see the National Snow and Ice Data Center's data (soil moisture, sea ice cover/concentration, snow cover [looks like MODIS is already available], permafrost, glacier outlines) on AWS.<p>I know there are people there that want to see it happen, but it's a matter of cost. What incentives/programs does Earth on AWS offer to assist stewards of public data to make it available on AWS?<p>Additionally, I think some of this data is normally behind URS/Earthdata Login, what did the politics of making the data available on AWS without URS look like?
Would love to see Amazon make an integration for Unreal Engine 4 or their Lumberyard video game engine so a game developer can easily import detailed swaths of the earth.
Exploring thru these datasets can be quite addictable. Especially with service like <a href="http://apps.sentinel-hub.com/sentinel-playground/" rel="nofollow">http://apps.sentinel-hub.com/sentinel-playground/</a>
What I'm psyched about is OpenStreetMaps data queryable with Athena. It's traditionally kind of a pain to convert PBFs to a queryable format.
This makes me want to take this open source weather forecasting model and run it on AWS. <a href="http://planetwrf.com" rel="nofollow">http://planetwrf.com</a>
On a somewhat related topic - can anyone recommend a geocoder available through AWS?<p>There are several AWS marketplace solutions available on the link at the bottom of the original article.[1] Only Geolytica and Forward Geocoder seem to be available to new customers, and both have < 5 reviews.<p>[1] <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/mp/gis/#geocoding" rel="nofollow">https://aws.amazon.com/mp/gis/#geocoding</a>
Slightly tangential, but is there a "modern" alternative to GDAL for working with raster data?<p>The last time I tried, stitching together tiles and cutting it to state boundaries took an inordinate amount of time (upwards of 15 minutes for 6 tiles from Landsat-7/8). Though, I'm half convinced it was because I was doing something very suboptimal..<p>Also, iirc, it was single threaded.
I'm always interested in these kinds of data.<p>A few months ago, I was looking at different open sources to geocode a lot of addresses around the world.<p>I have tried openstreetmap and some VM from datasciencetoolkit - both have poor results.<p>Are there other sources aside from Google? Google appears to be the most accurate.
Will the datasets be open to contribution from members of the public or are these readonly mirrors? Seems like Blue Horizon and Prime Now amongst many other of their offerings that would be use cases for up to the minute data?