Construct · 4 fields · 5 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one word, four constructs Nearest construct by meaningfunnelcompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to cloud is funnel.
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A visible mass of water droplets or ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere, formed when moist air cools past its dew point and vapour condenses onto tiny particles. Luke Howard's 1803 essay On the Modifications of Clouds gave the forms their Latin names, cumulus, stratus, and cirrus, and the layered scheme that later became the standard cloud classification. The referent is a physical body of condensed water hanging in the air, and the unit is a discrete cloud or cloud layer. What it shares with the other meanings is only the picture of something diffuse and boundaryless; nothing here is computed, stored, or made of data points.[1]
On-demand delivery of computing resources, servers, storage, and applications, over a network, so that a user draws capacity from a shared pool instead of owning the hardware. Mell and Grance's 2011 NIST definition (SP 800-145) fixes five essential characteristics: on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service. Armbrust and colleagues had framed the same shift in 2010 as making computing a public utility. The referent is a service-delivery model, and the unit is a provisioned resource billed by use. The word borrows the meteorological cloud only as a metaphor for something offsite and out of view; there is no water and no atmosphere.[2][3]
A set of data points positioned in a coordinate space, most often the millions of (x, y, z) samples a laser scanner or depth camera returns from a physical surface. Rusu and Cousins's 2011 Point Cloud Library made the structure a standard object in robotics and 3D perception. The referent is a discrete collection of measured coordinates, and the unit is one point or one cloud of points; the same word describes the loose scatter of observations in a statistical plot. It shares the diffuse-looking shape of a meteorological cloud, but each point is an exact, addressable datum, not a droplet, and the object lives in a data structure rather than the sky.[4]
An interstellar cloud of gas and dust, cold and dense enough for hydrogen to form molecules, and the region where stars are born. McKee and Ostriker's 2007 review Theory of Star Formation treats these clouds as the sites where gravity, turbulence, and magnetic fields compete to collapse gas into stars. The referent is a bounded concentration of interstellar matter, and the unit is one cloud, measured in solar masses and parsecs. It carries the everyday image of a cloud, a faint and extended mass, but it is made of molecular gas spread across light-years, not water hanging over a landscape.[5]
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