STAC Catalogs

Purpose

This page will outline STAC catalogs as a common metadata and discovery pattern for cloud-native geospatial datasets.

Outline

• What STAC is and how catalogs, collections, items, and assets relate.
• Strengths for dataset discovery, metadata consistency, and cloud-native access.
• Limitations around implementation quality, extension support, and provider-specific conventions.
• How STAC fits with imagery, rasters, vectors, model outputs, and analysis-ready data.
• Workflow relevance for search, filtering, provenance, and repeatable data selection.
• Engineering implications for pagination, signing assets, asset roles, and metadata validation.
• Access patterns through public APIs, static catalogs, client libraries, and platform integrations.

Later Examples

• Searching a catalog by date, area, and collection.
• Translating STAC items into processing inputs.
• Comparing static catalogs with dynamic STAC APIs.