Entitiescharacters

Entitiescharacters is a term used in information science and digital humanities to describe the integrated representation of named real-world entities and fictional or narrative characters within a single modeling framework. It contrasts with approaches that treat entities and characters as separate domains, offering advantages for cross-domain linking, disambiguation, and unified search.

In an entitiescharacters model, objects are annotated with a type field that distinguishes realworld_entity from fictional_character, while sharing a common set of core attributes such as canonical name, aliases, and relationships. Real-world entities may include persons, organizations, locations, and events; characters are defined by their roles in works of fiction or media. Systems typically store hierarchies of works, authors, and creators, and establish cross-domain links, for example mapping the real-world individual who shares a name with a fictional character or identifying a character who is inspired by a real person.

Applications include semantic search, knowledge graphs, digital humanities research, and recommender systems. By linking characters to the narratives they inhabit and entities to external registries (such as Wikidata or authority files), databases can support richer queries like “characters named Jordan who appear in sports-themed fiction.”

Challenges involve name ambiguity, multilingual variants, incomplete provenance, and maintaining consistent disambiguation across domains. The term entitiescharacters is not standardized and appears primarily in exploratory discussions of unified entity-character modeling.