A new geospatial term has been popping up on the Internet lately: the GeoCloud. Carl Reed, Chief Technology Officer in the July 2008 OGC newsletter (Chief Technology Officer’s Message: The Cloud) defines cloud computing:
The term “cloud” comes from the fact that we have all used the cloud symbol to represent the internet/web. Cloud computing therefore refers to consumers, developers and applications being able to access computing resources from the cloud. These computing resources are typically owned and operated by some third party provider – either for free or for a fee.
Thus, taking the concept one step further, adding Geo denotes that these computing resources have some geospatial aspect to them. As noted on the ENTCHEV GIS Blog, The Memory Leak blog has a laundry list of GeoCloud computing.
