Integrating a STAC Collection (from an APEx STAC Catalog) into the Geospatial Explorer dashboard

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1

Hi,

I am currently working with the ESA APEx platform (within the scope of EO4SEM project) and would like to integrate a dataset from my STAC catalog into the Geospatial Explorer interface. Specifically, I am interested in visualizing a STAC collection in the geospatial explorer

I have reviewed the Geospatial Explorer interoperability schema documentation, which outlines support for wms, wmts, cog, xyz, wfs, and geojson formats. However, it is not clear how STAC collections can be used directly — or whether they must be manually translated into cog layer configurations via direct asset URLs (this for us will be a huge problem since we are going to handle several hundreds of files).

Could you please advise on one of the following:

  1. Does the Geospatial Explorer natively support STAC endpoints (e.g., via a stac or equivalent format type)?
    If not, what is the recommended method to integrate STAC-based datasets, such as habitat maps, into the Explorer interface?

2)Is there a way to configure dynamic discovery of STAC items (e.g., by date) within the Explorer?

Any guidance, examples, or references you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance for your support.
Best regards,
João

2

Hi João.

Thanks for getting in touch with the APEx project team and for your enthusiasm to adopt the Geospatial Explorer in the EO4SEM project.

I am the UK lead at Sparkgeo who are the company developing the GE. As it is a relatively new solution, we’re still building out its capabilities. As you’ve noted from the schema docs, we’ve initially focussed on support for the underlying data formats. At present, we do have very basic STAC support (essentially just highlighting the AOI of a STAC item), but we’re about to embark on the next phase of development to include a comprehensive STAC solution within the GE. It would be great to have a discussion with you about your specific requirements and how these might feed into our development plans. Perhaps we could arrange a call?

Until we have undertaken this development, the actual STAC assets would need to be referenced in the configuration of the GE directly. However in relation to note 2, we are about to release the next version that has a user control for interacting with time series data, so that might be something that could be of value for your project irrespective of the STAC support.

We would also be happy to support you in building the configuration and could set up an initial config for you if you let us know your requirements.

Best regards,
Dan Ormsby

3

Hi Dan,
thanks for the fast response.
Yes a meeting would be very helpfull for us to explain what we want to achieve with the GE.
Just to let you know we are happy to what the GE is already capable and if it can go a little further it would be great.

Cheers,
João

4

GMV and Sparkgeo just had a very useful meeting, so here’s a quick rundown of what we talked about.

We discussed connecting the EO4SEM catalog with the Geospatial Explorer (GE). For GMV, the big goal is to bring in EO4SEM time-series datasets and have a time slider to navigate through them. Sparkgeo knows that a STAC component will be needed for this and will look into how much work it will take and when it might be possible to get it done. We agreed that time-series functionality is the top priority, and once that’s in place, we can start looking at other features.
I’d like to say thanks to the Sparkgeo team for spending their time and for the useful information they provided.

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