STAC catalogs for time-varying in-situ data

The ability to search a collection of datasets is an important factor for the usefulness of the data. By organizing the metadata into catalogs, we can enable dataset discovery, look up file locations and avoid access to the data files before the actual computation. Spatio-Temporal Asset Catalogs (STAC) is a increasingly popular language-agnostic specification and vibrant ecosystem of tools for geospatial data catalogs, and is tailored for raster data like satellite imagery. It allows for a search using a variety of patterns, including the spatial and temporal extent.

In-situ data is heterogenous and would benefit from being cataloged, as well as the ecosystem of tools. However, due to the strict separation between the spatial and temporal dimensions in STAC the time-varying nature of in-situ data is not optimally captured. While for approximately stationary sensors like tide gauges, moorings, weather stations, and high-frequency radars this is not an issue (see https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-8096), it becomes troublesome for moving sensors, especially if the sensor moves at a high speed, covers big distances, or if the dataset contains a long time series.

To resolve this, we extend the STAC specification by replacing the geojson data with the JSON-encoded ODC moving feature standard.