Creating clear, accurate and normalized representations of the real world is hard enough, but how about a world where people can fly, swing from rooftops, travel through time and come back from the dead with some regularity?

The fictional Marvel Universe has been built over 75 years by thousands of creative individuals and requires equally creative solutions to representation it as data. This talk will give an overview of how Marvel uses new technologies to understand its intellectual property, its representations in media and user base. You'll see how Marvel models and learns from the expansive set of people, places and things in its immense fictional universe (and how it solves a number of real business problems along the way).