🌱 TapRoot: A GIS Health and Wellness Information Tool

✨ The Inspiration: A System in Cardiac Arrest

We realized that true health isn’t found in a pill bottle alone—it’s found in our relationship with our environment. TapRoot was born from a simple, radical mission: to integrate five vital pillars of healing—Ecological, Cultural, Food/Farming, Ecorestoration, and Spirituality—directly into the modern clinical framework. We are latching onto the Cultivating Self mission to prove that healing the land is a prerequisite for healing the human body.

🌎 What It Does: More Than a Map

TapRoot is a high-performance GIS hub that aggregates disparate data streams into a single, actionable interface for clinicians and patients.

Heuristic Wellness Hub: We go beyond "Hard Data" (standard clinics) to include "Soft Data"—community-based healers, organic farms, and urban tree-planting projects.
Semantic Intelligence: Searching for "respiratory recovery"? TapRoot won't just show you a pulmonologist; it will find a local urban forest project that improves air quality.
Temporal Synchronization: Our real-time sync connects municipal calendars with GIS layers, showing you "happening now" events like horticultural therapy workshops or community rituals.

🛠️ How We Built It (The Stack)

We built a sophisticated pipeline to turn unstructured community wisdom into standardized, interoperable data:

Frontend & Backend: Next.js/React for a seamless, performant full-stack experience.
Mapping Engine: MapBox API to render high-resolution, interactive GIS layers.
Data Ingestion: Scrapy/Python for URL discovery across municipal and community sites.
AI Scraping: JinaAI for deep scraping of complex web content.
Parsing & Cleaning: OpenAI (LLMs) to extract entities like dates and specialties from unstructured text.
Storage: Supabase (PostgreSQL/PostGIS) for handling complex spatial queries and verified data.

🧗 Challenges We Ran Into

The "ETL" Hurdle: Accurately pulling data from "unknown behavior" websites (like a local healer's social media or a town's messy PDF agenda).
Schema Integrity: Maintaining a consistent JSON format for complex objects passing through various AI agents and APIs.
The Trust Layer: Structuring our database to separate verified clinical sources from crowd-sourced community wisdom.

🎉 Accomplishments We're Proud Of

Friendly Interface, Real Data: Successfully displaying a beautiful, user-friendly screen that populates with hyper-local, accurate wellness data.
Complete data Pipeline From starting by grabbing urls from the web to scraping them and cleaning/organizing data using LLM models
Community Trust: Implementing a system that verifies organic certifications automatically through the CCOF member directory.

🧠 What We Learned

Fullstack Mastery: Deepening our understanding of Next.js and Supabase for real-time applications.
AI Agent Workflows: Learning how to chain LLMs to clean data without losing its "human" context.
Data Structures: Mastering JSON limits and the nuances of Javascript functions for spatial data.

🚀 What's Next for TapRoot

Mobile Optimization: Making the engine fully compatible with all mobile browsers.
Community Tab & Reviews: Adding a space for local reviews and "Community Trust Scores" for alternative healers.
Submission Portal: A form for local growers and healers to request their own spot on the map.
Civic Triggers: Alerting users to local government meetings (like Water Boards or City Council) where they can speak up for local wellness policy.

Join the Movement. By turning unstructured community wisdom into standardized data, we can move from a system that manages sickness to one that cultivates health.