entity
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An entity is something that exists as itself. It does not need to be of material existence. In particular, abstractions and legal fictions are usually regarded as entities. In general, there is also no presumption that an entity is animate, or present. The verb tense of this form is to 'entitize' - meaning to convert into an entity; to perceive as tangible or alive.
An entity is anything that exists as a distinct thing, whether physical or abstract—like a person, a corporation, or an idea—without needing to be material or alive. The concept matters because it gives us a way to identify and talk about separate things in the world, from concrete objects to legal creations and intangible concepts.
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Wikidata facts
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- equivalent class
- iflastandards.info/ns/lrm/lrmer/E1
- exact match
- www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#Thing
- Wikidata usage instructions
- Every entity in Wikidata is implicitly an instance of (P31) entity (Q35120). These implicit instance of (P31) statements are not all observable in Wikidata. In general no item should explicitly be an instance of (P31) entity (Q35120). Only a small predefined set of items should be subclasses of (P279) of entity. For any regular entity the implicit relationship suffices even if there is no other class that can be found for the entity to be an instance of (P31).
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8 sectionsContents
- Etymology
- In philosophy
- In law, politics, economics, accounting
- In medicine
- In computer science
- See also
- References
- External links
An entity is something that exists as itself. It does not need to be of material existence. In particular, abstractions and legal fictions are usually regarded as entities. In general, there is also no presumption that an entity is animate, or present. The verb tense of this form is to 'entitize' - meaning to convert into an entity; to perceive as tangible or alive.
The term is broad in scope and may refer to animals; natural features such as mountains; inanimate objects such as tables; numbers or sets as symbols written on a paper; human contrivances such as laws, corporations and academic disciplines; or supernatural beings such as gods and spirits.