We wanted to visualize stac-geoparquet, but our experiment evolved into something slightly bigger. stac-map is a map-first, statically-served website with support for stac-geoparquet and natural language collection search.
Exploring SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) data shouldn’t require firing up the command line or a heavyweight desktop app. If you’ve ever wanted a lightweight, map-first way to browse a STAC GeoParquet file or Catalog, stac-map was built for you.
The eoAPI-stac API in stac-map
Most STAC GeoParquet tools today are terminal-based. They’re powerful, but not exactly friendly when you just want to zoom around a map. QGIS has support (since GDAL 3.5.0), but for quick exploration, there hasn’t been a simple online option - something in the spirit of pmtiles.io or viewer.copc.io.
That’s where stac-map comes in. Using DuckDB’s excellent spatial extension and geoarrow's deck.gl layers, it delivers an interactive, web-based way to open and explore stac-geoparquet files. No installation, no servers, just a map.
Visualizing and exploring a stac-geoparquet file.
A Map-first Approach
As we were building out the stac-geoparquet map prototype, it became clear there was room for more than just a viewer. Radiant Earth’s excellent stac-browser has long provided a catalog-oriented interface. stac-map takes a complementary approach: start with the map, then add discovery features on top. This map-first prototype includes:
- Collection search, including using Development Seed’s in-development natural language search (shown, left).
- Item search, including stac-geoparquet export.
- Load any STAC value (API, Catalog, Collection, Item) from a URL or from your local filesystem.
- Instant filtering by temporal window
All this in a no-server-required, single-page setup.
What's Next
This is just the beginning, but we wanted to share it now. Upcoming work includes asset rendering (because seeing the actual data matters) and integration with stac-auth-proxy for secure access to authenticated STAC APIs.
stac-map is open source and easy to deploy. We encourage you to test it, adapt it, and let us know how it works for you. Try stac-map in your browser and check out the GitHub repo. If you’d like to collaborate or discuss how this fits into your own STAC projects, drop us a note. Deploying stac-map is drop-dead simple, so feel free to add it to your own stack and let us know how it works!
What we're doing.
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