create STAC catalog in R

[wiesehahn]

Hi,
I find the concept of STAC catalogs quite promising although I have to admit that I still haven't understood many parts. So forgive me if my question or idea is silly.

Lets say I (the institute) have a ton of imagery and other geospatial data (sorted in several folders on network drive until now), and I want to make it searchable for others (internally first but with the aim to provide it online at some point). To my understanding it would be benefitial to create a STAC catalog (with collections,...).

I was wondering if there are helpers or resources on the creation of STAC catalogs from within R?

(As far as I understand rstac is meant to work with existing catalogs)

[OldLipe]

Hi @wiesehahn,

Lets say I (the institute) have a ton of imagery and other geospatial data (sorted in several folders on network drive until now), and I want to make it searchable for others (internally first but with the aim to provide it online at some point). To my understanding it would be benefitial to create a STAC catalog (with collections,...).

Indeed, using the STAC specification is beneficial to both the data provider and the users. The specification is well documented and has an active community.

Currently rstac does not support static STAC catalogs, but in the next package update we will include this functionality.

xref #21

[wiesehahn]

Are there any news regarding this topic?

[OldLipe]

Hi @wiesehahn,

We plan to add support for static catalogs in the next version of rstac (0.9.3 or 1.0.0).

[SteveViss]

Hi @OldLipe, has anyone made any progress on the feature requested by @wiesehahn?

I was wondering if there are helpers or resources on the creation of STAC catalogs from within R?

The overall idea is to generate catalogs, collections, and items that adhere to the existing STAC specifications (refer to https://schemas.stacspec.org/). Subsequently, these objects could either contribute by being POST to an existing stac-catalog or to a local one. Python is predominantly used in most utilities and tutorials for creating a STAC catalog. I think (maybe I'm wrong), it would be beneficial to include utilities and a vignette in this package that specifically addresses this aspect. If no one is currently working on it and you're open to the idea, I'd be interested in contributing by opening a pull request (PR)! Thanks!

[OldLipe]

Hi @SteveViss, thanks for asking!

One of rstac's developer, @rolfsimoes, implemented support for static catalogs. We'll finish testing this week and upload version 1.0.0 of the rstac package.

[wiesehahn]

Hey,
I am not sure, but I guess we are talking about different things here.

implemented support for static catalogs

you mean to query existing static catalogs?

What I meant in my initial question (and @SteveViss is also referring to) are helper functions to actually create json files which are valid STAC catalogs/collections/items.
Basically exactly what pystac does (see e.g. https://stacspec.org/en/tutorials/2-create-stac-catalog-python/). So far I am not aware of any functions implemented in R to do this. I am not sure how all available STACS are generated but I guess the majority via pystac.

Are there any plans to implement this or is this out of scope for rstac?

[OldLipe]

Hi @wiesehahn,

That's interesting!

We’ll discuss with the team and evaluate the feasibility of including this functionality in the next rstac release.

Thanks for bringing this into the discussion!

[bjyberg]

Hi @OldLipe,

This is functionality that my team would be very interested in as well, and I would be happy to help contribute to the implementation of this. I think there has also been some discussion about developing an R package based on Rustac by the team at Development Seed and @gadomski, but I do not know the scope of what they plan to implement.

[wiesehahn]

Just for reference, I guess you are referring to https://github.com/developmentseed/stacrsr.

Still very much interested in creating STACs from R.

[OldLipe]

That's great. Thanks for the links!

So, we plan to address this feature in the next release. The team is currently quite busy, but things should start to normalize over the coming months.
We'll keep you updated on the progress of this feature in the coming weeks.