The GeoCloud Just Got Bigger
[UPDATE August 1, 2008] Thanks to Adena Schutzberg for pointing out a recent GeoCloud post by Carl Reed, Chief Technology Officer at the Open Geospatial Consortium. All of a sudden, everybody is talking about the GeoCloud. Have we reached The Tipping Point?
Arc2Earth’s just-announced entry into the GeoCloud market space very neatly ties together the many seemingly disparate (but probably not) GIS-related topics GIS bloggers (myself included) have discussed lately – GIS and cloud computing, GIS on Mac, the emerging dominance of server GIS, the probable (or imminent) demise of desktop GIS, GeoJSON…
What is the GeoCloud you ask? Kirk Kuykendall has a laundry list by way of explanation. I will only add that expanding the GeoCloud in size and might is sure to slim down the numbers of desktop GIS users.
Quite ironically, I will be teaching an ArcView
Read Brian Flood’s full Arc2Earth Cloud Services announcement. Do click on the sample links for a taste of what’s ahead in the world of GeoCloud computing.
Posted by Atanas Entchev at 7/31/2008 11:08 PM 
Categories: blog,Microsoft,GIS,Software,GeoCloud,GeoJSON,Online Mapping,Virtual Earth,Technology,Google
Categories: blog,Microsoft,GIS,Software,GeoCloud,GeoJSON,Online Mapping,Virtual Earth,Technology,Google
Atanas,
Got one more reference for you: Carl Reed at OGC just wrote about the cloud and standards. http://www.opengeospatial.org/pressroom/newsletters/200807/#C1
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Hi Atanas -
I don't think the cloud will entirely replace the desktop any time soon. Take a look at Sketchup, for example. This is a desktop app provided by Google to edit a particular type of spatial data and publish it to the web. They chose to do it with a desktop app instead of Ajax.
I think the next step for the cloud is not in creating and editing geodata, but in analyzing it.
Someday soon programmers will be able to publish geoprocessing modules to the cloud. Perhaps something like a space utilization geoprocessing model that solves the "Dinner Party Problem" for cubicle layout.
http://www.math.hmc.edu/funfacts/ffiles/30002.4.shtml
An office manager using a desktop app like Google Earth or ArcGIS Explorer would search and discover this geoprocessing model, assign affinities between pairs of office workers whose cubicles have been tagged in the kmz, a URL to the kmz, and credit card number. When the office manager runs the model, the cloud would perform the computation.
As the market for geoprocessing grows, there will be more demand for the desktop apps that create and edit spatial data.
Kirk
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Kirk:
I agree. Nevertheless, I do think that the number of desktop GIS users will go down, particularly the number of ArcGIS (ArcView) users. Many of them will opt to migrate to the thin-desktop-client/cloud-processing model that you describe.
As someone who until recently still had the ArcView 0.9 floppy disk install set, I have witnessed how as ESRI kept packing more and more processing power into ArcView, confusion and frustration replaced the original excitement in the early ArcView users. I do hope that the GeoCloud will bring some of that excitement back.
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your topic seems interesting Atanas. Hope to get some more information in this.
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