1. Collect and retain provenance
Approved importers archive source material under the estate's R2-first policy. Compact D1 projections carry only the fields needed for safe serving; private raw objects are not exposed through this site.
2. Resolve a strict place identity
The normalised course name must agree across one of six reviewed pairs: OpenGolfAPI, GeoNames or Wikidata paired with another of those registries or with OpenStreetMap. Latitude and longitude must each differ by no more than 0.001 degrees. Registry-to-registry pairs must also supply the same country. For an OSM pair, the independent registry must supply the country; if OSM omits its country tag, that second value remains visibly missing rather than being inferred.
3. Collapse repeated identities
Gateway-qualified rows are grouped by normalised course name and country, then joined when they share a corroborating registry record or the same strict mapped location. The most useful complete row becomes the canonical page; suppressed duplicate URLs redirect to it.
4. Recheck evidence before materialisation
Projection membership is not enough by itself. The shared gateway confirms that both registry sources remain approved, ready and permitted for commercial public use, and that both source records still have public links and dates. The site then writes one private checksum-verified daily snapshot; requests reject an invalid or older-than-48-hour snapshot and fall back to the complete gateway gate.
5. Keep observations separate
Course identity, country and mapped location appear as source-separated observations. A missing OSM country value is marked as absent. Uncorroborated or structurally unreliable fields are not promoted into public course facts.
6. Build navigation only above a threshold
A country or US state page requires at least 3 qualified child records. A city or county index requires at least 3 named courses already in the set. Course pages need at least 3 unique evidence fields. Internal search, query combinations, empty geographies, private feeds, near-me landings, league-year farms, Top 100 listicles and discovery-only records remain outside the sitemap.
7. Refresh without false freshness
Global projections and reports refresh daily from the qualified gateway edition. Course pages retain the underlying serving and source dates. The sitemap does not claim that an unchanged course was substantively edited today.
8. Gate planning layers separately
A planning overlay never makes a course page eligible. UK public-transport access appears only for active, authoritative and dated NaPTAN nodes within 5 km of the corroborated course coordinate. US forecasts are fetched from the National Weather Service only on request and must carry a current generation time and current or future periods. Overture Maps Places 2026-07-22.0 supplies attributed, proximity-only address, contact and nearby hospitality context after its own match and quality gates; hours, ratings, price, availability and open/closed status remain withheld. Approved Environment Agency station and current-flood imports follow the same rule: the station join is bounded by distance, the England-wide flood snapshot distinguishes a complete zero from unavailable or not checked, and neither becomes a turf, access, opening, local-risk or playability claim. The large NOAA GHCN-Daily and catchment-classification imports stay provenance-only until a separately reviewed course-level projection exists. None of these layers becomes an access, route, service, course-condition, recommendation or safety claim. See the conditions and environment boundary.
Rights and attribution
OpenGolfAPI and OpenStreetMap data are licensed under ODbL 1.0 and remain visibly attributed and source linked. GeoNames is CC BY 4.0. Wikidata is CC0 and is credited as good practice. Overture entries retain their per-record CDLA Permissive 2.0, Apache 2.0 or CC0 attribution. NaPTAN is attributed to the Department for Transport under OGL v3.0; Environment Agency station, current-flood and catchment data are OGL v3.0; NWS and NOAA material are United States Government open data. Held accommodation feeds, R&A equipment, affiliate offers and unlinked event data remain unpublished until their separate rights, identity, freshness and serving-layer gates pass.