Planet-scale raster catalogs with STAC

SpatioTemporal Asset Catalogs (STAC) is a set of standards defining geospatial metadata, catalog organization, and search APIs. With a growing set of tooling and support from the open-source community, STAC is making it easier and more efficient to discover, search, and analyze geospatial data. Element 84 operates EarthSearch, a STAC catalog of the complete Sentinel-2 archive in Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF (COG) format, as part of the Registry of Open Data on AWS.

This talk will explore STAC and uncover what makes it a powerful technological foundation for building large data catalogs like Element 84’s EarthSearch. An overview of the EarthSearch architecture will be presented, including processing items into a STAC catalog using cirrus-geo, and indexing and search using stac-server.

A key point of the talk will be to examine the value of STAC for cloud-based workflows. Querying EarthSearch using open-source STAC tooling to discover scenes and access data chunks will be shown to illustrate this value.