Heritage Guide

When Parks Canada announced it was deleting the Canadian Register of Historic Places, Stephen Taylor rebuilt the entire database in under 24 hours. Heritage Guide preserves over 13,500 designated heritage sites in a modern, bilingual interface — and runs on a Raspberry Pi.

Full-Stack SoftwareAI Integration

What it is

I n January 2026, Parks Canada quietly announced it would decommission historicplaces.ca — the national database of over 13,500 heritage sites formally recognized by federal, provincial, territorial, and municipal governments. The heritage community was alarmed. The National Trust for Canada called it an emergency. Provinces said they were blindsided. Parks Canada offered Excel spreadsheets — without images — as a replacement. Heritage Guide was the response. Using AI tools, Stephen Taylor downloaded the full dataset in under six hours and built a complete replacement site within 24 hours of the CBC breaking the story. The result is a bilingual, fully searchable interface with multi-faceted filtering, geolocation-based discovery, an interactive map, and detailed pages for every one of the 13,554 registered sites — including photographs, heritage value statements, and character-defining elements that Parks Canada's data exports omitted. The project runs on a Raspberry Pi. CBC, Radio-Canada, Yahoo News, and international outlets covered the story. Taylor offered to give the site to the government if they found it useful.

What I did

Built the entire application in under 24 hours — using AI tools to download all 13,554 heritage site records including images, descriptions, heritage value statements, and character-defining elements from the Parks Canada database before decommissioning
Designed a modern search and discovery system with multi-faceted filtering by province, construction period, recognition date, historic function, and theme — a significant improvement over the original government interface
Implemented geolocation-based discovery (Near Me), an interactive Explore Map, curated city pages, and browsing by building type for intuitive geographic exploration
Built the site as a fully bilingual (English/French) application to maintain accessibility for all Canadians
Deployed on a Raspberry Pi — demonstrating that a single developer could build and host what Parks Canada said was too technically complex and costly to maintain
Prepared vector embeddings across the full dataset for planned AI-powered semantic search capability