Title

AWS re:Invent 2023 - Building next-generation sustainability workloads with open data (SUS304)

Summary

Sam Bidlin, a solutions architect at AWS, and Dr. Vince Smith from the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London, discuss the role of open data in sustainability workloads.
The NHM is digitizing and organizing a global scale natural science collection to create a Planetary Knowledge Base (PKB).
AWS technologies like Amazon Neptune, Neptune ML, and AWS Glue are used to build a knowledge graph for the PKB.
Open data is crucial for addressing sustainability challenges like climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss.
AWS supports open data through programs like AWS Marketplace, AWS Data Exchange, and Registry of Open Data.
The Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) hosts over 180 datasets to accelerate sustainability research.
The PKB aims to be a comprehensive model of the natural world, potentially serving as a global early warning system for pandemics, conservation indicators, and policy-making.

AWS is deeply involved in supporting sustainability efforts through its cloud services and open data initiatives.
The collaboration between AWS and NHM showcases the potential of combining historical data with modern cloud and machine learning technologies to address global challenges.
Open data democratizes access to information, enabling a broader community of researchers, developers, and organizations to contribute to sustainability solutions.
The use of AWS services like Amazon Neptune and AWS Glue demonstrates the practical application of AWS technologies in building complex, data-driven systems.
The Planetary Knowledge Base represents a significant step towards integrating disparate data sources into a unified, actionable knowledge graph that can inform research and policy.
AWS's commitment to open data and sustainability is evident in the support and resources provided to organizations like NHM, facilitating the creation of next-generation workloads that can have a global impact.
The talk emphasizes the importance of breaking down barriers to data access and the role of AWS in enabling organizations to leverage cloud computing for sustainability.