The cultural heritage of a region is conveyed by both tangible physical artifacts and intangible aspects in the form of stories, dance styles, rituals, etc. Hitherto, the task of creating digital representations for each of these aspects has been addressed in isolation, i.e. using specific media most suited to the artifact such as video, audio, three-dimensional (3D) models, scanning, etc. The challenge of bringing together these separate elements to create a coherent story, however, has remained unaddressed until recently. In this paper we present a unified digital framework that enables the integration of disparate representations of heritage elements into a holistic entity. Our approach results in a compelling and engaging narration that affords a unified user experience. Our solution supports both active (user-controlled explorations) and passive (watching pre-orchestrated narrations) user interactions.

Many popular online services provide "local" or "yellow-pages" search, but none of them allow users to customize the search over user-specified data. This paper describes a novel system for providing custom local search over user-provided spatial datasets logically combined with detailed street-level vector data. We present the algorithms and architecture underlying our prototype system, which handles complex queries and elegantly solves the problem of parsing terms from multiple datasets in the presence of ambiguity and misspellings. We show that the system provides custom local search with precision and recall figures that often exceed that of a commercial local search service. Further, we show that our system scales gracefully with the number of individual custom data sets being served simultaneously.

Address geocoding, the process of finding the map location for a structured postal address, is a relatively well-studied problem. In this paper we consider the more general problem of crosslingual location search, where the queries are not limited to postal addresses, and the language and script used in the search query is different from the one in which the underlying data is stored. To the best of our knowledge, our system is the first crosslingual location search system that is able to geocode complex addresses. We use a statistical machine transliteration system to convert location names from the script of the query to that of the stored data. However, we show that it is not sufficient to simply feed the resulting transliterations into a monolingual geocoding system, as the ambiguity inherent in the conversion drastically expands the location search space and significantly lowers the quality of results. The strength of our approach lies in its integrated, end-to-end nature: we use abstraction and fuzzy search (in the text domain) to achieve maximum coverage despite transliteration ambiguities, while applying spatial constraints (in the geographic domain) to focus only on viable interpretations of the query. Our experiments with structured and unstructured queries in a set of diverse languages and scripts (Arabic, English, Hindi and Japanese) searching for locations in different regions of the world, show full crosslingual location search accuracy at levels comparable to that of commercial monolingual systems. We achieve these levels of performance using techniques that may be applied to crosslingual searches in any language/script, and over arbitrary spatial data.

Robust, global, address geocoding is challenging because there is no single address format that applies to all geographies, and in any case, users may not restrict themselves to well-formed addresses. Particularly in online mapping systems, users frequently enter queries with missing or conflicting information, misspellings, address transpositions, and other such variations.