seriesand

Seriesand is a web-based, open-data platform designed to catalog and interconnect narrative series across media formats. It provides a collaborative database for series metadata, including television shows, web series, book series, comics arcs, and film franchises. The platform emphasizes a graph-oriented data model that represents series as a hierarchy of works: series, seasons or volumes, and installments or episodes, together with cross-relations such as spinoffs, adaptations, continuations, and shared universes.

Seriesand was conceived by a community of data enthusiasts and editors in the late 2010s, with the first public prototype released in 2018 and growing through community contributions. It operates under an open-data ethos, with data released under a permissive license to encourage reuse in research, education, and fan projects. The project is maintained by the Seriesand Foundation and a network of volunteer editors who review changes and apply governance policies.

Data model and features: It uses a graph database backbone to encode items such as works, episodes, editions, and creators, linking entries by relationships like author, producer, air date, language, and region. The API supports RESTful access, bulk imports, and programmatic queries; users can submit edits, view revision histories, and discuss changes. Validation rules enforce consistency across fields like titles, dates, and disambiguation.

Impact and reception: The platform has been adopted by fan wikis, scholarly projects, and media-curation tools for metadata interoperability. Proponents cite its flexibility and open access as enabling cross-media research, while critics raise concerns about data quality, moderation capacity, and licensing compliance in user-contributed content.

See also open data, media metadata standards.