Big Aloha Guide
Open-data Hawaii discovery, rendered as a fast public guide.
A static Hawaii travel, history, and public-data guide built from committed data files plus reviewed public-source records, Wikidata, Wikipedia, and Wikimedia Commons, then deployed to Cloudflare Workers Static Assets. Every reader-facing narration is citation-verified against its sources, and nothing publishes without passing through a human review gate. The result is a fast, crawlable site with thousands of place pages, an interactive map, and live public-data layers.
Public knowledge, made into a real guide
Hawaii travel and history knowledge is scattered across open data, encyclopedic sources, government GIS exports, and media repositories. Big Aloha Guide turns those sources into a single, fast, crawlable site, while keeping attribution and source traceability as first-class product features.
The bet is that public knowledge sources are only useful as a destination guide if source traceability, image correctness, static generation, and human review are treated as features rather than afterthoughts. A Python harvester pulls and normalizes records into committed data files, and Astro renders them at build time into place pages, island hubs, category listings, a Hawaiian-monarchy genealogy, and a chronological event timeline. Every AI narration is checked against its sources before it can render.
Static site, living data pipeline
A data pipeline writes committed artifacts, Astro builds a static site from them, and Cloudflare serves it at the edge. Dynamic surfaces are deliberately thin and review-gated, so the reader-facing experience stays fast and cacheable.
Python data harvester
A Python pipeline (httpx, SPARQLWrapper, Pydantic) harvests and normalizes Wikidata, Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and government GIS records into committed data/*.json and GeoJSON artifacts, so CI can build the whole site without live harvesting.
Astro static build
Astro and Tailwind CSS generate every route at build time from the committed data: home, browse, islands, place pages, category listings, history eras, plus a sitemap and a client-side search index. The build enforces a performance budget on images, scripts, and CSS.
Cloudflare Workers Static Assets
The dist/ output deploys to Cloudflare Workers Static Assets via Wrangler, with the apex and www domains bound to the Worker through routes. GitHub Actions builds on PR and deploys on main.
Same-origin review-gated API
A thin Cloudflare Worker fronts the deployment: requests under /api/* go to the Worker (validated, rate-limited, backed by D1), everything else falls through to the static assets. Reader submissions land as pending until an editor approves them.
Thousands of pages, real public-data layers
The site renders a deep catalog of Hawaii places and history, an interactive map, and a growing set of government open-data hubs, all from committed, reviewed data.
🗺️ Place & island pages
Harvested entity pages across islands, categories, beaches, parks, waterfalls, species, and historic sites, with island-correct scenic heroes.
👑 Hawaiian history
A traceable monarchy genealogy, the pre-1778 aliʻi-nui ruling lines of five islands, six history eras, and a chronological event timeline.
🔗 Page interconnection graph
1,265 Wikidata relationship edges across 485 pages over 28 properties, genealogy, succession, buried-at, educated-at, residence, rendered as "Connected pages" trails.
🧭 Interactive map & search
A Leaflet map with clustered markers and a text fallback, plus a fast client-side search over an external, cacheable index asset.
🌊 Public-data hubs
State and county GIS layers, shoreline access, parks, moku land divisions, watersheds, aquifers, census tracts, libraries, trails, with attribution and CSV/JSON exports.
🪶 Cited Quick Facts
Richer Wikidata facts (birth/death place, awards, population, elevation) and ʻōlelo-Hawaiʻi names, backfilled deterministically and shown as structured sections.
Built for speed, traceability, and review
- Static-first, edge-delivered. The reader-facing site is 100% static and CDN-cached on Cloudflare, low runtime cost, predictable deploys, and crawlable pages, with dynamic surfaces kept deliberately thin.
- Data-file-driven content. Committed JSON and GeoJSON artifacts are the source of truth, so CI builds the entire site without live API calls, and content review happens as ordinary data diffs.
- Citation-verified narration. Every one of the 2,220 AI narrations (Claude Haiku) is substring-grounded against its sources. Unverified narrations never render, those pages fall back to attributed source text instead.
- Human review at every gate. Source records, image selections, Wikidata enrichment snapshots, and reader contributions all stay review-only until a human promotes them, with selected/rejected ledgers so wrong-subject images are remembered, not rediscovered.
- Tested and budgeted. 33 agent unit tests and 20 infrastructure tests (all offline, LLM mocked) cover harvester contracts and the citation verifier. Playwright smoke tests cover home, search, map fallback, filters, exports, and the responsive menu. A deterministic performance budget gates image, script, and CSS size on every build.
Live, fast, and traceable
Big Aloha Guide runs in production at bigalohaguide.com, serving the real Astro site from Cloudflare Workers Static Assets with the apex and www domains bound to the Worker. It illustrates open-data engineering at scale, a Python harvester feeding a static Astro build, citation-verified narration, a Wikidata-derived page graph, public GIS data layers, and a review-gated contribution path, shipped as a fast, public guide.