In April over 70 speakers and 800 participants came together for the incredible Cloud-Native Geospatial Outreach Event. Our goal for the event was to highlight just how far the movement around COG, STAC, Zarr & COPC has come, and to accelerate its path towards becoming the way to make geospatial information accessible to the world. Almost everyone who attended was blown away by the breadth and depth of what was covered, and it was clear that cloud-native geospatial is already having a substantive impact on the world.

I am very pleased to announce the schedule for the Cloud-Native Geospatial Outreach Event that I’m organizing with the Open Geospatial Consortium next week (April 19th and 20th). We’ll have over 70 5-minute lightning talks, along with 6 in-depth tutorials, from an incredible set of speakers. The event will be entirely virtual and completely free and is spread across time zones to be friendly to a global audience. The talks will also be posted as quickly as possible, so everyone can see the ones that aren’t in the right time zone.

Announcing three open requests for proposals for SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) projects. 

In my previous post, I shared that we’ll be funding a number of different STAC initiatives. One of our goals with the STAC ecosystem funding is to grow the number of contributors working on STAC. To that end, we have three completely open requests for proposals that are designed to help fund developers to have some paid time on a few key projects. We encourage everyone to apply and are especially interested in proposals from traditionally underrepresented groups.

In September of 2020, we organized the first ‘Cloud-Native Geospatial Outreach Day’, which shared all that was going on with Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFs (COG) & SpatioTemporal Asset Catalogs (STAC) with a wider audience. Though I am clearly biased, it was my favorite event of the last three years, as it really showed how far these new emerging specs have come and it brought many new collaborators into the community.

In the last update post, I shared that we had a great set of sponsors come in to further the greater STAC ecosystem. I’m pleased to share that we had a first successful ‘funders call’ to determine the priorities for the money we raised. This probably slowed the process a bit, but it was super valuable for the STAC Project Steering Committee to hear from key sponsors what they see as most needed in the STAC ecosystem. It was a great conversation, and I look forward to future calls.

More and more organizations benefit from the STAC specification and publish their geospatial data with STAC metadata. Having the data published in a standardized way in JSON is paving the way to wider adoption of geospatial data so that humans can find and make good use of the data. There is no doubt having JSON files is nice for developers, but it is equally important to spread the data to professionals in other sectors. Those users often need an easily accessible and searchable graphical user interface for the data. That is where STAC Browser comes into play.

As stactools approaches its one-year birthday we (Chris Holmes and Rob Emanuele, your co-authors for this blog post) figured it’s time to give it a proper introduction. It’s grown to be a key part of the SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) ecosystem, but somehow there’s never been a blog post announcing it or explaining what it does. So we figured it’s time to share a bit about what it is, how it got started, and where it’s going.

It’s been almost 3 months since my last blog post on SpatioTemporal Asset Catalogs (STAC), which is one of the longest stretches I’ve gone in the past few years. There’s been lots of progress and growing momentum in the community, so it seemed like a good time to pull together all the happenings in one blog post.

STAC Funding Initiatives – The first topic to share is the state of funding for the STAC ecosystem. In the previous post, I shared about our open requests for proposals. I’m pleased to announce that we’ve selected Element84 to make the new STAC website and Jonathan Healy for the STAC validation enhancements. We’ve also decided that Radiant Earth will lead the open RFP’s for the tutorial work, which will take up most of the final funding from the STAC 1.0.0 Funding effort. Once we finish up all the contracts for that initiative I’ll do a final summary blog post.

Following up on our SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog 1.0.0 announcement, this post will finish our mini–series diving into the STAC specification and the ecosystem around it. This one is really about the future, where we see STAC heading in the next six months and beyond. And after this I hope to start an in-depth series of STAC posts that dives deeper into individual projects, highlighting all the great software and data in the STAC ecosystem.
The ‘STAC Ecosystem 1.0’ Vision
One of the core tenents of the STAC Community is that we focus on the process of building an interoperable ecosystem, with the specification serving as a record of the current state of collaboration. With the release of 1.0.0, it is our hope that the core of that collaboration now has an incredibly solid foundation. But there is much, much more to do in order to realize the vision of STAC: we won’t be ‘done’ until every single ‘geospatial asset’ has an associated STAC record.