Open GIS Data

AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofit Symposium Washington, DC I June 25-26, 2015

AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofit Symposium Washington, DC I June 25-26, 2015©2015, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

Open GIS Data

Jed Sundwall

Open Data, AWS


Agenda• Open data on AWS• Jaques Tardie, Snapsat• Ian Dees, OpenAddresses & OpenStreetmap• Chris Rasmussen, NGA


What is open data?Open data is data that can be used by anyone for any purpose for free.

Many of our customers, such as Esri, the Weather Company, and the Climate Corporation, rely on quality open data as much as they rely on our computing, storage, and other web services.


Open data on AWSMaking data open on AWS enables more innovation by making data available for rapid access to our flexible and low-cost computing resources.


Landsat – big open dataThe Landsat program is a joint effort of

the U.S. Geological Survey and NASA.

It is the longest running program to

gather Earth imagery from space and

is considered the gold standard for

natural resources satellite imagery.

It can be time-consuming and

expensive to acquire, store, and

analyze Landsat data.


Landsat on AWSAWS has committed to make up to 1

petabyte of Landsat imagery available

through the AWS Public Data Set

program.

Over 170,000 Landsat 8 scenes are

available now, and about 700 are

added every day.

Now anyone can analyze Landsat data

at web scale with no up-front

investment of time or capital expense.


Landsat on AWSSince March 19 launch:

• 270 million hits from 147 countries

• >3 million hits per day on average

• 19TB of data transferred per day

• 2 brand new applications: Snapsat and

Astro Digital browser

• Fueling new product development from

Mapbox, Esri, CartoDB, MathWorks,

and Development Seed



Snapsat: Making Landsat imagery accessible

Jacques Tardie

Co-founder, Snapsat


The cost of working with geospatial data has plummeted, thanks to:

• Technological innovation• Open source culture• Open data


Brilliant. this is the greatest leap in facilitating the use of satellite data I’ve ever seen. In 1990, it was a US$50K SGI workstation (three colours!), a separate US$20 K machine to run the tapes + US$20K of software. Oh, and each image cost US$625.


It’s getting better, but…


The learning curve remains steep


The old process required:• Understanding the command line.• Knowing which tools to install• Knowing how to configure them• Time• Bandwidth


The new process requires:• A browser• A mouse• A few clicks


We flattened the curve


Why now, and why us?


What does the future look like?


Special thanks to: • Amazon Web Services• Jed Sundwall• Code Fellows• Cris Ewing


Email [email protected]

mailto:[email protected]



Collecting the World’s Open Address Data

Ian Dees / @iandees

OpenAddresses & OpenStreetmap


Problems we’re trying to solve• Addresses are the human interface to

geographic data• A map isn’t usable by humans until they can

locate themselves• Street address is where everyone starts• Geocoders are the software that translates from

an address to a point on the map


Problems we’re trying to solve• Make it easier to build geocoders• Improve and promote access to open data• Share data improvements


Existing projects• OpenStreetMap

– 51M addresses, 30K monthly active users

• OpenAddresses.org• OpenAddressesUK


Our project• http://openaddresses.io• Crowd-sourced list of ~1000 open data

sources• Contributions are made through Github• Software stack to download and transform• 127M points, 64 contributors

http://openaddresses.io/

http://openaddresses.io/


Our project• Output is bare minimum right now:

lat, lon, house #, street, city, state, postcode

• We keep source data, so new outputs are trivial


Where to next?• Crowd-sourcing points isn’t sustainable,

we need more authoritative datasets• Convince entities to release data to the

public• Lots to do internationally, but still plenty to

do in the US


Where to next?• Feedback mechanism• Licensing• Organization


Thank You.This presentation will be loaded to SlideShare the week following the Symposium.

http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices


Technology

Open GIS Data