Data as a service: Are we in the clouds?

John A. Olson, Syracuse University, New York, USA shares his views on the geographical data management and cloud computing. The strength of institutional repositories (IRs) is their emphasis on long-term preservation; however, the problem of data migration, including GIS data, has not been resolved. There are several new or newer associated activities in the data IR world, thus new terms related to data gathering and storage are spreading through the workplaces such as daas, cloud-based storage, cloud sourcing and cloud computing. The Library of Congress is experimenting with cloud-based storage, to provide a platform for federal agencies to share and provide access to their internal data clouds for access by federal employees and the public. The associated activity with the cloud project is called 'crowd computing', as the crowd-based projects are more likely to be locally created and have details and features that commercial data sets do not have.