1. 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

2. AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofit Symposium
Washington, DC I June 25-26, 2015
Agenda
• Open data on AWS
• Jaques Tardie, Snapsat
• Ian Dees, OpenAddresses & OpenStreetmap
• Chris Rasmussen, NGA

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

4. AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofit Symposium
Washington, DC I June 25-26, 2015
Open data on AWS
Making data open on AWS enables more innovation by making data
available for rapid access to our flexible and low-cost computing
resources.
Amazon S3
Bucket
Amazon
EMR
Amazon
EC2
AWS
Lambda
Amazon
Redshift
Amazon
DynamoDB

5. AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofit Symposium
Washington, DC I June 25-26, 2015
Landsat – big open data
The 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.

6. AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofit Symposium
Washington, DC I June 25-26, 2015
Landsat on AWS
AWS 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.

7. AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofit Symposium
Washington, DC I June 25-26, 2015
Landsat on AWS
Since 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

8. 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.
Snapsat:
Making Landsat imagery accessible
Jacques Tardie
Co-founder, Snapsat

9. AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofit Symposium
Washington, DC I June 25-26, 2015
The cost of working with geospatial data has
plummeted, thanks to:
• Technological innovation
• Open source culture
• Open data

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

11. AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofit Symposium
Washington, DC I June 25-26, 2015
It’s getting better, but…

12. AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofit Symposium
Washington, DC I June 25-26, 2015
The learning curve remains steep

13. AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofit Symposium
Washington, DC I June 25-26, 2015
The old process required:
• Understanding the command line.
• Knowing which tools to install
• Knowing how to configure them
• Time
• Bandwidth

14. AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofit Symposium
Washington, DC I June 25-26, 2015
The new process requires:
• A browser
• A mouse
• A few clicks

15. AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofit Symposium
Washington, DC I June 25-26, 2015
We flattened the curve

16. AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofit Symposium
Washington, DC I June 25-26, 2015
Why now, and why us?

17. AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofit Symposium
Washington, DC I June 25-26, 2015
What does the future look like?

18. AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofit Symposium
Washington, DC I June 25-26, 2015
Special thanks to:
• Amazon Web Services
• Jed Sundwall
• Code Fellows
• Cris Ewing

19. AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofit Symposium
Washington, DC I June 25-26, 2015
Email us
snapsat@snapsat.org

20. 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.
Collecting the World’s
Open Address Data
Ian Dees / @iandees
OpenAddresses & OpenStreetmap

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

22. AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofit Symposium
Washington, DC I June 25-26, 2015
Problems we’re trying to solve
• Make it easier to build geocoders
• Improve and promote access to open data
• Share data improvements

23. AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofit Symposium
Washington, DC I June 25-26, 2015
Existing projects
• OpenStreetMap
– 51M addresses, 30K monthly active users
• OpenAddresses.org
• OpenAddressesUK

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

25. AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofit Symposium
Washington, DC I June 25-26, 2015
Our project
• Output is bare minimum right now:
lat, lon, house #, street, city, state, postcode
• We keep source data, so new outputs are
trivial

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

27. AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofit Symposium
Washington, DC I June 25-26, 2015
Where to next?
• Feedback mechanism
• Licensing
• Organization

28. AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofit Symposium
Washington, DC I June 25-26, 2015
Thank You.
This presentation will be loaded to SlideShare the week following the Symposium.
http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices
AWS Government, Education, and Nonprofit Symposium
Washington, DC I June 25-26, 2015