Application of the Spatio-Temporal Asset Catalog Specification for Open Government Data

The Spatio-Temporal Asset Catalog (STAC) specification enables spatial data providers to distribute their datasets within a hierarchical metadata catalog structure containing collections, items, and assets. This catalog specification, implemented as an Application Programming Interface (API), allows spatial and temporal search queries making the data providers’ spatial assets discoverable. The Carinthian Geoinformation System (KAGIS) sought to apply this novel specification to improve its spatial data infrastructure and make its open government datasets more accessible to a wider range of users. Another motivation for deploying a STAC API is the possibility of providing spatially and temporally overlapping datasets, enabling the distribution of both recent and historical spatial data. To generate dynamic catalog data sustainably, a primary focus of this project was to create the STAC structure using already existing metadata stored in relational database tables. The generation process was achieved by implementing a script that extracts this metadata from the organization’s relational database and builds the catalog structure. To facilitate access to the dynamic catalog data and enable clients to query the datasets, the conceptualization and implementation of an API were necessary. This involved designing an API architecture used to set up a Python interface accessing and querying the storage system containing the dynamic STAC data. Thorough testing processes evaluating the STAC data generation script and the STAC API confirmed highly satisfactory outcomes. For both results, the reusability of the implementation for generating and deploying the dynamic STAC played a significant role in the process.