Support Static STAC Catalogs

[drwelby]

It would be useful to also read static STAC catalogs.

Initially I'd say this would work by checking if the URL is a JSON document, then loading it and disabling the UI portions related to search, filtering, and pagination.

[cholmes]

+1 to supporting static catalogs in some way, but I do struggle with what it would actually do. I guess if it gave you a little interface where you could 'browse' down to any catalogs and items and then load the assets it'd be useful.

Also could be interesting if it could suck down all the json and combine it into a single geojson layer, where you could then browse the map, and then have some way of letting a user to select assets from the outline.

The other thought I had was it could be cool to suck the json into a database and include a stac-fastapi instance that runs locally, so you could search static catalogs with the same tools.

[drwelby]

We (very manually) offer our users the ability to convert their STAC catalogs to QGIS layers:

So this would give you more a way to browse and add only the things you want. An S3 browser plugin would accomplish the same thing, but using STAC is nice because you can also see item metadata.

One distinction to note here is that these catalogs only cover the data in a customer order, they are not the same as having a static STAC "endpoint" of the entire DG catalog that you can't search.

We are close to having the STAC search API implemented, just running into some OAuth hiccups.

[cholmes]

Cool, that makes sense. I'd love to show that off with Planet Orders API output as well.

It could be interesting to have a 'browse' tab in the STAC API Browser window, especially with the new browseable conformance class. It would be greyed out if a server didn't support browsable. But if it did, or was a static STAC, then it'd show up. Or maybe the 'results' tab could be used for both. The basic view could perhaps be a folder type interface.

[drwelby]

We have lots of sample data available in the static format at https://ard.maxar.com/samples/. It's a public S3 bucket, use it however you need.

[jo-chemla]

Hi there, joining the bandwagon to see if there are plans to implement this Static STAC catalog feature in this qgis plugin.
+ huge thanks for the great work!