Add a StacCollection.search method

[TomAugspurger]

Purely as a convenience, it'd be nice to have a StacCollection.search method that uses pystac-client to search an endpoint with a specific collection.

cat = intake.open_stac_catalog("/path/to/catalog")
collection = cat["my-collection"]
collection.search(bbox=bbox)

The .search method would use pystac-client

1. Find the link with a "rel": "search". Set that as the endpoint
2. Specify collections=[self.id], to limit the search to just that collection.

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I see now that intake's base Catalog class apparently defines a search method, which appears to do some kind of text-based search on the items. I suspect that most STAC users would expect search to behave like STAC search.

[jhamman]

This sounds great @TomAugspurger! I personally don't see any good reason to avoid overriding the base class search method but we should ask @martindurant for his thoughts.

[martindurant]

Please do make specialised versions of search(), the one in Catalog is super-simplistic and only meant to be a fallback when nothing better is available.

[scottyhq]

The .search method would use pystac-client

@TomAugspurger I really like this idea, but it would need some docs / error handling for the cases that "rel":"search" doesn't exist.

I'm thinking of the case of a static catalog/collection, where there is no API endpoint. For that case we could:

1. Stick with default intake.search() that I think just does some string pattern matching.

2. Or implement a simple 'local api' search with the same keywords that to filter by bbox and datetime (e.g. geopandas operations on the static catalog represented as a GeoDataFrame How to integrate intake-stac and geopandas #36). @matthewhanson probably has some ideas on performance here, and things would likely be quite slow if someone tries this on a really big catalog.

[matthewhanson]

I do rather like the idea of being able to do a search on a static catalog, but that seems like it should be implemented in pystac-client as well (which is named as such as it's a client for both static catalogs and APIs).

Currently pystac-client will raise an APIError if there is no rel=search link

[jsignell]

I have done a bit of work putting together an implementation of pystac-client style search for static catalogs. This work lives in https://github.com/jsignell/stac-static it could be possible to delegate search to that library. The main limitation is that it depends on having a geodataframe version of the stac metadata though.

[martindurant]

The main limitation is that it depends on having a geodataframe version of the stac metadata

I am not in a good position to reckon how much of a limitation that is.