Investigate STAC catalog option

[huard]

STAC could be used server side as a catalog server. If I understand correctly, there is an ESM extension in development by the Pangeo community.

Ideally, THREDDS would have a STAC endpoint serving STAC + ESM catalogs. This is however unlikely to occur in the near to mid-future. I suspect we'll have to deploy software to convert the THREDDS catalog to a STAC + ESM catalog, then serve this using a dedicated STAC server. The client could be intake-stac with intake-xarray.

My suggestion for short term progress would be to

• Find/write THREDDS crawler based on TDS Catalog
• Write function to export to intake-esm catalog (planning to switch to future stac-esm catalog)
• Demonstrate usage with intake client

While

• Contributing to ESM extension schema
• Installing STAC server
• Building experience with intake-stac client

Tools

• siphon to interact with the THREDDS catalog. Could possibly have a plugin to export catalog object to STAC or Intake catalog object.
• pystac: read/write stac catalogs

References

• https://unidata.github.io/siphon/latest/index.html
• https://github.com/pangeo-data/pangeo-datastore-stac
• https://github.com/pangeo-forge/cmip6-pipeline/issues/7
• https://github.com/NCAR/esm-collection-spec/issues/21
• https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/pangeo-forge/cmip6-pipeline/blob/master/catalog_stuff/crawl-serial.ipynb
• https://github.com/radiantearth/stac-spec/tree/master/extensions
• https://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/tds/current/catalog/InvCatalogSpec.html
• https://medium.com/pangeo/introducing-intake-stac-2c988d8e1d30
• https://github.com/intake/intake-xarray

[philipkershaw]

Hi David @huard - found this issue from https://github.com/pangeo-forge/cmip6-pipeline/issues/7 Just wanted to highlight that for the ESGF future architecture work we are planning to ditch using THREDDS catalogues for datasets. The new container-based release of ESGF that we are trialling does just this. All dataset information would need to be referenced direct from the ESGF Search API. In the longer run we are looking at community standards for the search API for ESGF. An ESM profile of STAC could be a good candidate.

[huard]

Hi Phil @philipkershaw !

We are relying on the NcML API to provide aggregated views of multiple files composing the same dataset (periods, members, variables), as well as other OGC APIs (WMS, WCS). Do you know if support for these APIs is in the cards within the new ESGF stack ?

I think it would be worthwhile for us to get better acquainted with the ESGF new architecture roadmap to schedule our own efforts and collaborate. Are there documents we can look into ?

[philipkershaw]

There would be nothing to stop a data provider in ESGF generating specific THREDDS catalogues and NcML for the purposes of aggregations or whatever else. We have had some experience of this at CEDA with the ESA CCI data we host.

However, the change for the future architecture is that the new publishing system would not generate THREDDS catalogues per dataset as part of the publishing process. We are still some time away from having deployment of the new system across the federation. Planning is still underway for the roadmap to get to this point. The next step is to deploy the new system as a pilot at sites that would like to participate. There is a project board for the new work:

https://github.com/orgs/ESGF/projects/1

...but this is more of detailed development view than a broader roadmap. There is also the ESGF Future Architecture report which has an analysis of the existing system and proposals for changes and a roadmap for implementing these:

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3928222

I will try and keep you up to date with our plans and would be happy to discuss further if you have questions.