The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB) is a database of bibliographic information on science fiction and related genres such as fantasy fiction and horror fiction. The ISFDB is a volunteer effort, with both the database and wiki being open for editing and user contributions. The ISFDB database and code are available under Creative Commons licensing and there is support within both Wikipedia and ISFDB for interlinking. The data is reused by other organizations, such as Freebase, under the creative commons license. While the ISFDB is primarily a bibliographic research database it also contains biographic data for books, authors, series, and publishers that do not meet Wikipedia's notability standards.
The ISFDB database indexes authors, novels, short stories, publishers, awards, and magazines. Additionally, it supports author pseudonyms, series, awards, and cover art plus interior illustration credits which is combined into integrated author, artist, and publisher bibliographies. An ongoing effort is verification of publication contents and secondary bibliographic sources against the database with the goals being data accuracy and to improve the coverage of speculative fiction to 100%. The current database statistics are available on line. ISFDB was the winner of the 2005 Wooden Rocket Award in the Best Directory Site category.
In 1998, Cory Doctorow wrote in Science Fiction Age: "The best all-round guide to things science-fictional remains the Internet Speculative Fiction Database". In April 2009, Zenkat wrote on Freebase "...it is widely considered one of the most authoritative sources about Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror literature available on the Internet."
As of May 2009, Quantcast estimates that the ISFDB is visited by over 32,000 people monthly.
As a real-world example of a non-trivial database, the schema and MySQL files from the ISFDB have been used in a number of tutorials. ISFDB schema and data were used throughout Chapter 9 of the book Rails For Java Developers. It was also used in a series of tutorials by Lucid Imagination on Solr, an enterprise search platform.
Read more about Internet Speculative Fiction Database: History
Famous quotes containing the word fiction:
“A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send cheques to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)