Interactive Taxonomy Navigator

Outcomes

Context

Information architecture tools fail when only architects can update them.

Challenge

Domain taxonomies lived in spreadsheets. Stakeholders needed an interactive navigator they could embed, without keeping a heavy CMS or backend running in production.

Approach

We built an Express transform API to parse Excel into JSON, and a Vite frontend that compiles to an embeddable widget. Production serving is static JSON + widget — the transform API is a build-time tool.

Architecture

Vite widget frontend, Express Excel→JSON API, static JSON hosting, script-tag embed API.

Scope

• —Excel ingest
• —JSON publish
• —Interactive navigator UI
• —Embed contract

Constraints

• —Non-engineer content updates
• —Must embed into existing sites
• —Prefer static hosting in production

Solution highlights

• —Build-time transform, runtime static
• —Simple `TaxonomyNavigator.render(...)` embed API
• —Widget styling isolated for host-page safety

Technologies

Results

• —Embeddable taxonomy explorer for arbitrary host pages
• —Spreadsheet authors remain the content source
• —Production path without a permanent transform backend
• —Clear example integration for integrators

Lessons learned

• —The best CMS for taxonomies is sometimes Excel plus a compiler.
• —Embed APIs should be smaller than the visualization.
• —Static runtime reduces ops for internal tools.