I have been pondering Martin Daly’s post on the cloud and GIS:
Is The Cloud?
- Not new, just the same as The Grid.
- Exactly what GIS has been waiting for all along.
- Neither of the above.
I’m tending towards 3; 1 and 2 being more-or-less mutually exclusive.
I’m tending towards 2 (Exactly what GIS has been waiting for all along.) But in fact is this not what has happened already with Web Mapping API. Who in their right mind would now host their own background mapping and imagery as a default? And now you can consume advanced geoprocessing tasks within web mapping and web mapping data within traditional GIS.
Update 25th Aug
This sums it up for me…
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“Who in their right mind would now host their own background mapping and imagery as a default?”
In my experience, lots of people. Like those who want to use a coordinate reference system other than Spherical Mercator. Or those who want to view/print/publish at a specific scale that is not divisible by two from the extents of the world. Or those who have more up-to-date imagery than GYM (they do exist you know).
Also, downloading pre-rendered tiles is hardly GIS in the cloud. It is just tiles in the cloud. GIS is not just purdy pictures you know. You used to know that before being assimilated
That said, GIS in the cloud obviously has a big future. I just don’t think that GIS has been severely hindered by the lack of – and therefore been waiting for – the cloud.
Ok, my statement was a little extreme (but it got you to comment!).
Perhaps I could rephrase it as:
“The starting point should always be to look to web mapping services to provided background mapping/aerial data (unless there are specific needs around granular scale, coordinate reference systems, etc)”
What’s wrong with purdy pictures, it is still 99% of GIS use (or are we back to the ’90s debate of “what is GIS”)?
Does that “99%” figure come from the same source as the near mythical “80% of all data is spatial”?
Of course. I prefer the myths to “lies, dammed lies and statistics”…