Announcing STAC Japan 2026
Last week we announced CNG Japan 2026, a half-day cloud-native geospatial gathering in Tokyo on August 24. Today we want to share more about the colocated event outside of Tokyo: STAC Japan.
We’re thrilled to announce the first STAC community gathering in Japan.
Over three days at JAXA’s Tsukuba Space Center, the STAC Project Steering Committee (STAC PSC), JAXA staff, and STAC practitioners from across industry and academia will come together to support and grow the STAC community in Japan and surface STAC’s strategic value for open science. The workshop is hosted by JAXA’s Satellite Applications and Operations Center (SAOC, Space Technology Directorate I) in partnership with the STAC PSC, and is intentionally timed for the week before FOSS4G 2026 in Hiroshima.
Three Days, Three Audiences
Each day of the workshop is designed for a different slice of the STAC community.
Tuesday, August 25: Maintenance Sprint. This day is for the builders: specification and ecosystem maintainers gathering to work through outstanding issues and divide up needed work on STAC specs and ecosystem projects. If you’re actively contributing to the STAC specification or its tooling, this day is for you.
Wednesday, August 26: Data Producers. A workshop focused on training data providers on how to best catalog their data in STAC. The emphasis is on best practices, lessons learned, and shared problem-solving for teams running STAC catalogs and APIs in production.
Thursday, August 27: Data Users. A day for the people building on top of STAC. Use cases, scientific applications, and industry adoption stories from across the Japanese geospatial community and beyond, with a goal of helping practitioners who use or want to use STAC find the best ways to integrate it into their workflows.
Why Japan, Why Now
STAC adoption has grown rapidly across North America and Europe, but the community in Asia has been comparatively underrepresented in the standard’s development and visibility. With JAXA as an anchor host and partner, this workshop is a deliberate investment in changing that. Building a durable STAC community in Japan strengthens the global standard, expands the pool of open Earth observation data, and gives Japanese practitioners a direct seat at the table.
Make It a Week
If you’re coming from outside Japan, consider arriving a day early for CNG Japan on August 24 in Tokyo, a half-day gathering for the broader cloud-native geospatial community, before heading to Tsukuba for the sprint. From there, FOSS4G 2026 in Hiroshima the following week makes for a full run of geospatial programming on a single trip.
Register
To attend any of the 3 days of the event, register here.
Questions? Reach out to michelle@cloudnativegeo.org.
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