Scott Nicholas
Amazon Web Services and Data.World have teamed up to make data from the annual U.S. Census Bureau survey available in the cloud as an AWS Public Dataset.
Amazon said Wednesday that it has uploaded the American Community Survey public use microdata sample to the cloud as part of an effort to foster innovation and help users such as local officials, community and business leaders process the data via computing resources.
“Until now, ACS microdata has been made available via [File Transfer Protocol] as raw .csv files, and its metadata has been stored in human-readable data dictionaries separate from the data,” said Jonathan Ortiz, data scientist and knowledge engineer at data.world.
Ortiz noted that the latest effort on the AWS public dataset looked to develop options for access to the ACS microdata which covers a non-aggregated individual record-by-record view of the population,
He added that data.world’s National Science Foundation-funded work which converts the ACS into a graph database helps boost the information’s usability for clients.
