Microsoft is positioning Planetary Computer as a tool for building environmental applications, using data to watch population, pollution, plant cover, weather, and more, with data that can be used as part of its AI for Good machine learning program.
Planetary Computer isn’t a single application. Instead, it’s a framework for bringing multiple data sources together to build and deliver a collection of different geospatial environmental applications. At its heart is a catalog of curated data sources from a mix of commercial, academic, and government organizations, along with the necessary APIs to query and use that data, as well as ways to display results.
APIs are based on the STAC (SpatioTemporal Asset Catalogs) specification. You can search by coordinates and by time, allowing you to track changes over time, for example, tracking the foliage in a specific area of rainforest over weeks, months, or years. STAC is designed to be provider-agnostic, so the queries you have built to work against one source in Planetary Computer’s catalog can be repurposed to another as you add more sources to your application.