Approximately six years ago, the KyFromAbove program encountered a dilemma because browsers were no longer FTP-friendly. For decades, the program had provided all its data free for public consumption via an FTP server. These data were all compressed/zipped archives. We quickly transitioned to Box.com as an alternative to serve this data, but this met neither our needs nor our consumer needs.

Two years ago, we were fortunate to be accepted into AWS Open Data Sponsorship Program. This Program assists KyFromAbove by supporting the storage and distribution of all open data assets and exposing them in the Registry of Open Data. We quickly worked to download our data from Box to convert it into cloud-friendly formats, mainly Cloud-Optimized Geotiffs and Cloud-Optimized Point Clouds. Since transitioning, we achieved a major milestone in acquiring 3" leaf-off ortho and oblique imagery statewide. Without the open data program, storing and distributing over 300 Terabytes of imagery and elevation data would quickly become costly.

But the true benefit of exposing KyFromAbove data on an open data platform and adopting cloud-friendly formats, is the data is now more usable and discoverable than ever. People can use tools such as STACs (SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog) to spatially and temporally query, Titiler to create and serve dynamic mosaics, GDAL, PDAL, and the list goes on.

In this talk, I will provide an overview of how we transitioned our data into the Open Data Registry. Finally, I will highlight some examples and tutorials demonstrating how users can easily consume our data in various cloud-friendly formats and open and free software.