One of the most commonly used requests of our users, immediately behind “get data at specific location” is “which data are available at specific location”. For a long while the only API to handle these requests was Web Feature Service (WFS), which does the job, but is not really best at it due to the fact that WFS is primarily designed to serve general vector data. By standard the results coming from WFS are XMLs, which are not the preferred format anymore.
We now have a dedicated API for that - Catalog API:
https://docs.sentinel-hub.com/api/latest/#/Catalog/
and API Reference:
https://docs.sentinel-hub.com/api/latest/reference/#operation/getLandingPage
When designing this API we wanted to use something that is modern, fit for purpose and well known in the community. The SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog spec was an obvious choice due to growing use and open-source tools available to work with it. We were even involved in STAC’s evolution a tiny bit, through our participation in openEO project but the main credits go to Chris Holmes, Mathias Mohr, Matt Hanson and many others.
Aside from “get me information about all data at specific locations” there are some nice features supported by the STAC API:
- List distinct dates of the data available at specific location
- Query data based on some parameters
- Reduce the size of the output by only retreiving specific information about data
We hope this API will serve many users so go on and explore it.
More information about the STAC: