Amazon public data sets

Earthtimes reports that Amazon just launched its Public Data Sets service (home). The project encourages developers, researchers, universities, and businesses to upload large (non-confidential) data sets to Amazon — things like census data, genomes, etc. — and then let others integrate that data into their own Amazon Web Services (AWS) applications. AWS is hosting the public data sets at no charge for the community, and like all of AWS services, users pay only for the compute and storage they consume with their own applications. Data sets already available include various US Census databases, Labor Statistics, and an annotated form of the Human Genome from Ensembl. Sounds like it could grow into something very useful.