The SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog specification is an emerging standard for to cataloging geospatial data from different sources, and a specification for serving that data in an API. This talk will be a detailed overview of STAC illustrating it's usefullness in integration with cloud-based processing workflows. It will cover the core set of metadata fields for STAC Catalogs, Collections, and Items, along with available extensions for describing different types of data (EO, SAR, Point Cloud, etc.).

With the basics of STAC in hand, we will then go over the available Open Source tools that are available for working with STAC metadata: validators, compliant APIs, client command line tools and libraries for search, access, and exploitation. Finally we will give an overview of available STAC catalogs for searching and accessing publicly available datasets (e.g., Landsat-8, Sentinel-1/2, NAIP) using these Open Source tools.

After this talk you should have a good understanding of the metadata used to describe satellite imagery and be able to use existing open-source tools to immediately search and access this data.