Introduction to STAC

SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) is a specification designed to establish a standard in geospatial data. It allows searching across multiple providers for geospatial assets which share a common structure and set of metadata.

UP42 has two sets of asset APIs:

• /v2/assets that allows you to manage and download UP42 assets in storage.
• /v2/assets/stac that allows you to retrieve STAC objects mapped to your UP42 assets. STAC objects contain sets of geospatial information.

• STAC catalog

  The starting point for navigating STAC, a top-level object that provides a linking structure for grouping other STAC objects.

• STAC collection

  An UP42 asset you received in storage as a result of a completed tasking or catalog order. It groups related items and aggregates their summary metadata. A STAC collection contains STAC items.

• STAC item

  An individual scene in a STAC collection that has a unique spatiotemporal extent. Different spatiotemporal extents produce different STAC items.

  • Examples of different spatial extents are tiled images.
  • Examples of different temporal extents are images with different acquisition times.
  • Examples of different spatial and temporal extents are stereo pairs or tri-stereo triples with different angles and acquisition times.

  A STAC item contains STAC assets.

• STAC asset

  A geospatial feature of a STAC item, its quicklook, or metadata file. For example, multispectral and panchromatic products of an image acquired by an optical sensor are different STAC assets.

• STAC extension

  A JSON schema with additional parameters available for a specific STAC object. Extensions differ based on data availability, sensor, and constellation.

For more information, see UP42 API reference.

Depending on the type of STAC object, API responses will return a corresponding API object type.

Not all geospatial collections can return STAC-related information and can be accessed through the /v2/assets/stac API.

• STAC documentation
• STAC overview
• Intro to STAC
• The STAC specification
• STAC tools and resources