CultureBridge

Turn the artists, shows, films, and brands you love into a map-ready city guide for Berlin or Toronto, powered by Qloo's taste graph and an Amazon Bedrock agent.

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CultureBridge — Find your kind of city.

Discover local places in Berlin or Toronto through the music, shows, films, and brands you already know.

The problem

Arriving in a new city can be overwhelming when you don't know where to go. Traditional travel platforms often recommend generic tourist attractions, while asking a general-purpose AI chatbot for personalised places can produce fabricated venues or unsupported claims about cultural connections.

People already have cultural interests they know and love. CultureBridge explores how those interests can become a starting point for discovering somewhere unfamiliar.

What CultureBridge does

CultureBridge is a Qloo-powered cultural discovery application supporting Berlin, Germany and Toronto, Canada.

Users choose a destination and a starting taste profile:

  • Mumbai newcomer
  • Art & indie
  • Food & fashion
  • Custom

They can then search for and explicitly confirm their cultural interests across artists, TV shows, movies, brands and public figures.

Once their interests are confirmed, CultureBridge generates a city guide containing up to eight places, with category filters, available venue details and an interactive map.

How Qloo powers discovery

Qloo is central to the application.

Its /search API resolves cultural interests into canonical entities, while /v2/insights uses those entities as taste signals to discover destination-specific place candidates.

CultureBridge runs individual single-interest queries alongside a blended multi-interest query. It records which query surfaced each place and its position within that query, allowing users to inspect the search provenance behind recommendations.

The /v2/tags API supplies category metadata and supports category-based discovery and fallback.

The Amazon Bedrock agent

An Amazon Bedrock Converse tool-use agent orchestrates the discovery process through four tools:

  • resolve_anchor — resolves and checks confirmed cultural entities.
  • discover_places — retrieves place candidates through Qloo.
  • find_tags — searches Qloo's category-tag catalogue.
  • finalize — constructs the guide from trusted, accepted recommendations.

The model operates within server-side trust boundaries. It cannot change the selected destination, use unconfirmed anchor IDs or finalize with invented or unaccepted venue IDs.

Deterministic safeguards

CultureBridge separates AI orchestration from deterministic screening.

TypeScript validation screens candidate venue records for missing names, closed status, flagged accommodation and transit records. Category-conflict scoring is applied when a category filter is explicitly requested.

The output is schema-validated, and recommendation explanations undergo specific rule-based checks with deterministic template fallback.

If Bedrock fails or times out, CultureBridge can fall back to a deterministic Qloo discovery pipeline.

The experience

The application includes:

  • Guided two-stage onboarding and explicit Qloo entity confirmation.
  • An editorial city-guide interface.
  • Category filtering and available venue information.
  • An interactive Leaflet map synchronized with recommendations.
  • Expandable recommendation details.
  • A transparent discovery trace showing how suggestions were found.

Technology

Next.js, React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, Qloo Taste AI API, Amazon Bedrock Converse API, AWS SDK, Zod, Leaflet, OpenStreetMap and CARTO.

Honest limitations

A Taste-graph result badge indicates that Qloo returned a venue within the top ten of a single-anchor query and that the record passed configured deterministic screening. It does not prove a real-world cultural relationship, endorsement or guaranteed personal relevance.

Broad Qloo queries can sometimes return unexpected tourist attractions or noisy venue metadata. Category-conflict scoring only runs when an explicit category is requested. Live opening hours and real-time operating status are not independently verified.

CultureBridge makes this distinction visible because transparent discovery is more useful than pretending every recommendation is perfect.

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