2026-09-03 –, Conference Management Room4
STAC has evolved into core geospatial infrastructure. This talk covers its current state, real-world adoption, key challenges, and how it fits into emerging architectures for scalable discovery and analysis.
The SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) has evolved from a community-driven specification into widely adopted infrastructure for geospatial data. With its recognition as an OGC Community Standard and broad use across government, commercial, and open data platforms, STAC is now a foundational part of modern Earth observation systems.
This talk provides a current “State of STAC,” focusing on where the ecosystem stands today in real-world use. We’ll cover the maturity of the core specification and API, patterns that have enabled widespread adoption, and the growing role of extensions in supporting new data types and use cases.
We’ll also examine areas where the ecosystem is still evolving, including interoperability with other OGC APIs, managing extension complexity, and scaling catalogs and APIs for increasingly large datasets.
Finally, we’ll look ahead to how STAC fits into emerging systems. While STAC remains critical for data discovery and interoperability, many workflows are evolving toward layered architectures where STAC feeds downstream indexing and analysis systems.
This talk offers a grounded view of STAC as it exists today—what is stable, what is still changing, and what comes next as the ecosystem continues to grow.
STAC Specification
STAC ecosystem - several open-source projects underpin the STAC spec by providing an open ecosystem
Matthew Hanson is a geospatial technology leader specializing in Earth observation data systems, open standards, and cloud-native geospatial architectures. With 30 years of experience in remote sensing, imaging science, and software engineering, he has played a key role in advancing interoperable data ecosystems, including significant contributions to the STAC specification. Matthew works across industry and government to design scalable platforms for satellite data processing and discovery, and is an active contributor to open-source projects and a frequent speaker at geospatial and Earth observation conferences. This will be Matt's 12th FOSS4G.