science Under the Hood

Methodology — How We Build the Asian Film Catalog

Exact data source (TMDB, ODC-By), quality filters (150+ char synopsis, 10+ votes, no adult), country attribution rules, and weekly sync cadence.

Data Source

All structured film and series information on Asia Web Awards is sourced from The Movie Database (TMDB), a community-maintained open catalog. TMDB metadata is licensed under the Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-By), which permits commercial reuse with credit. We comply by attributing TMDB sitewide in the footer of every page.

Metric Definitions

Field Meaning Source
TMDB Rating Audience mean rating on a 0–10 scale TMDB community votes
Vote Count Number of individual audience ratings contributed TMDB
Popularity TMDB’s internal popularity score, recent user activity weighted TMDB
Primary Country First production country listed in the TMDB record that matches our Asian country list Derived
Decade Tag Decade of first release, computed from release_date / first_air_date Derived

Quality Filters

We import a title into our catalog only if all of the following are true:

  • Release status is Released, Ended, Returning Series, or Canceled (no Planned/Rumored).
  • The synopsis is at least 150 characters — shorter descriptions indicate incomplete metadata.
  • The title has at least 10 audience ratings — protecting against completely unseen entries.
  • The adult flag is not set.
  • Primary production country is one of 24 Asian nations, or the original language is an Asian language.

Processing Pipeline

Source CSV → MySQL custom table (FNKMaU_enp_films) → WordPress post via WP-CLI batch. Each post’s body content is rendered server-side from the structured row — no duplicate content across pages because every block (synopsis, rating, keyword set, related titles) is unique to the entity. Related-title recommendations are computed by a database query that matches primary country + shared first genre, ordered by popularity.

Update Cadence

The upstream catalog refreshes daily. Historical film and series metadata (release date, country, genre) does not change, so our stored records remain accurate long-term. We re-run the sync job periodically to pull newly eligible titles and to refresh audience rating / vote count where material movement has occurred.

Known Limitations

  • We do not index trailers, stills, or cast biographies — TMDB’s API fields for those are not part of the dataset we ingest.
  • Co-productions are attributed to the first listed Asian production country, not split across nations.
  • Release dates represent the primary release and may not reflect country-specific delayed theatrical runs.