Canonical Entity Architecture — Dual Surface

Decision

Canonical entities exist at two URLs serving two different query intents:

• Network canonical page — "who/what is X?" — abstract entity, cross-cutting facts, cross-franchise appearances, proposal/citation lineage
• Franchise canonical page — "tell me about X in this world" — narrative, exposition, story context within one Franchise's canon

Both are indexed. They don't compete because they answer different questions. Mental model: Wikidata vs Wikipedia, compressed into one domain.

Schema relationships

• Network page: Thing / Person / Place / Event etc., with subjectOf listing every Franchise page treating this entity, and sameAs to Wikidata where real-world analogues exist
• Franchise page: CreativeWork with about pointing to the Network entity and isPartOf pointing to the Franchise

This signals to search engines and answer engines: related but distinct artifacts about the same entity.

Promotion rule

Every entity has a Fact node in the graph. Only some entities get promoted to an indexed Network canonical page. Promotion triggers (exact thresholds deferred — see B-004):

• Appears in 2+ Franchises, or
• Has meaningful cross-franchise relationships (references, adaptations, shared-world forks), or
• Accumulates enough structured Facts or relationship edges to stand alone as a reference page

Entities below the bar still exist as Fact nodes in the graph. They power cross-linking, disambiguation, and "appearances elsewhere" modules — they just don't expose an indexed page.

Reasoning

Thin-content risk. If most entities only appear in one Franchise, auto-publishing a Network page for every entity ships near-duplicate content at scale.

Graph ≠ indexed surface. Cross-linking the graph is independent of cross-linking the indexed surface. The graph drives "appearances elsewhere" modules and disambiguation menus without requiring every node to be indexed. The right coupling direction: indexed surface depends on the graph, never the reverse.

Open question

Specific promotion thresholds and the body that maintains them — see B-004.