[FEATURE] Add Taxonomy Explorer page and interactive visualization

[Warren Ehrenfried (warrenehrenfried)]

Pull Request

Closes #492

Taxonomy Explorer

Rebuilds the Places taxonomy browser on the current canonical taxonomy and adds an interactive sunburst view of the full hierarchy.

The original idea and the first visualizations are from Ron Rice. How could we forget his presentation at the member summit in Florence! This is that concept brought into the docs site and regenerated from current data and with as much interactivity and features that I felt appropriate.

Intended to land for the September 2026 release, when the legacy categories property is retired and the taxonomy becomes the public reference for how Overture describes places.

What's here

• Generated from the canonical source. scripts/build-taxonomy.mjs reads the taxonomy and basic-category files from the places pipeline and emits versioned artifacts. basic_category is derived the way the pipeline derives it, so the docs can't drift from the published data.
• A sunburst view, alongside the existing tree. Colour follows the top-level groups and re-splits as you drill in; scroll to zoom, drag to pan.
• Place counts from the release itself, queried from 2026-08-19.0 (70,345,858 places). Categories show both their own count and their roll-up.
• Downloads — taxonomy, basic categories, and the legacy crosswalk as CSV
• Fixes to what was there: opens on the newest release rather than the oldest, release labels carry their year, and the March entry's version tags were showing December's.
• The taxonomy guide is now reachable from the sidebar, it was linked from every release note but wasn't navigable (bug)

Renamed from Taxonomy Browser to Taxonomy Explorer, with a redirect from the old URL.

[github-actions]

Super-linter summary

Language	Validation result
JAVASCRIPT_ES	Pass ✅
MARKDOWN	Pass ✅
NATURAL_LANGUAGE	Fail ❌
SQLFLUFF	Pass ✅

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/github/workspace/docs/guides/places/_README.md
  22:63  ✓ error  Incorrect term: “repo”, use “repository” instead  terminology
  34:60  ✓ error  Incorrect term: “repo”, use “repository” instead  terminology

✖ 2 problems (2 errors, 0 warnings, 0 infos)
✓ 2 fixable problems.
Try to run: $ textlint --fix [file]

[github-actions]

🗺️ Overture Docs preview is live!

🌍 Preview site	https://staging.overturemaps.org/docs/pr/504/index.html
🗂️ Schema ref	main@39e4170
🕐 Updated	Sep 04, 2026 20:37 UTC
📝 Commit	09e5dfe

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