Requiring title, id, description

[777arc]

Just wanted to share some thoughts while I learned about STAC for the first time. I would have expected title to be required and description to be optional. Eg one might not have any description because there might be nothing more to say besides what's already in the required metadata, and it's easily treated as an empty string (if left out) by applications like STAC Index. This also brings up the question if applications that display Collections should use id instead of title as the primary label since title is optional. Looking at STAC Index (first screenshot below) it looks like it uses title (id) as the overall title. Meanwhile in Items, the id is used as the labeled title (see 2nd screenshot), bringing up the question why the title field even exists at all. For folks creating applications around STAC it's nice to have one really clear way things are done.

Thanks!

[emmanuelmathot]

The best practises document recommends to always set the title field in order to avoid discrepancies

One further recommendation to help tools is to always include the 'title' field when including a link, especially in the item, child, parent and root links, even if it repeats several times. This should be the same as the 'title' in the link destination. Having this enables clients to display a nice human readable name of the link without having to open the link destination.

In the version 1.x, the title field cannot be mandatory without a breaking change and thus shall be expected for version 2.x also for aligning with OGC features

[777arc]

Awesome! Will description be mandatory in 2.x?

[m-mohr]

I'd assume that description is still mandatory in 2.x, but it can always be discussed to be optional in 2.x. Please not thet description can not be empty in the 1.1 and later schemas. We fixed the schemas accordingly as it was an oversight in 1.0 to not require it to be filled in some cases.

Please note that STAC Index is just one implementation and STAC Browser for example handles it differently (title is preferred over id unless there's no title). Also not that there's a difference between Collections/Catalogs and Items. Finding titles for items is often much more difficult in comparison to Collections.

Closing as duplicate of #1300