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An entity is something that has a distinct, separate existence
Existence

In common usage, existence is the world of which we are aware through our senses, but in philosophy the word has a more specialized meaning, and is often contrasted with essence....
, though it need not be a material existence. In particular, abstraction
Abstraction

Abstraction is the process or result of generalization by reducing the information content of a concept or an observable phenomenon, typically in order to retain only information which is relevant for a particular purpose....
s and legal fiction
Legal fiction

Legal fictions are fact or situations assumed or created by courts which are then used to resolve matters before them. Legal fictions are mostly encountered under common law systems....
s are usually regarded as entities. In general, there is also no presumption that an entity is animate
Life

Life is a characteristic of organisms that exhibit certain biological processes such as chemical reactions or other events that results in a transformation....
. Entities are used in system developmental models that display communications and internal processing of, say, documents compared to order processing.

An entity could be viewed as a set containing subset
Subset

In mathematics, especially in set theory, a Set A is a subset of a set B if A is "contained" inside B. Notice that A and B may coincide....
s.






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An entity is something that has a distinct, separate existence
Existence

In common usage, existence is the world of which we are aware through our senses, but in philosophy the word has a more specialized meaning, and is often contrasted with essence....
, though it need not be a material existence. In particular, abstraction
Abstraction

Abstraction is the process or result of generalization by reducing the information content of a concept or an observable phenomenon, typically in order to retain only information which is relevant for a particular purpose....
s and legal fiction
Legal fiction

Legal fictions are fact or situations assumed or created by courts which are then used to resolve matters before them. Legal fictions are mostly encountered under common law systems....
s are usually regarded as entities. In general, there is also no presumption that an entity is animate
Life

Life is a characteristic of organisms that exhibit certain biological processes such as chemical reactions or other events that results in a transformation....
. Entities are used in system developmental models that display communications and internal processing of, say, documents compared to order processing.

An entity could be viewed as a set containing subset
Subset

In mathematics, especially in set theory, a Set A is a subset of a set B if A is "contained" inside B. Notice that A and B may coincide....
s. In philosophy
Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, truth, beauty, justice, validity, mind, and language....
, such sets are said to be abstract object
Abstract object

An abstract object is an object which does not exist at any particular time or place, but rather exists as a Type_ of thing . In philosophy, an important distinction is whether an object is considered abstract or concrete....
s.

Sometimes, the word entity is used in a general sense of a being
Being

In ontology being is anything that can be said to be, either Transcendence or Immanence.The nature of being varies by philosophy, given different interpretations in the frameworks of Parmenides, Leucippus, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hegel, Heidegger, and Sartre....
, whether or not the referent has material existence; e.g., is often referred to as an entity with no corporeal
Corporeal

Corporeal may refer to:relating to the body*Corporeal undead, See also:...
 form, such as a language. It is also often used to refer to ghosts and other spirits. Taken further, entity sometimes refers to existence or being itself. For example, the former U.S. diplomat George F. Kennan
George F. Kennan

George Frost Kennan was an American advisor, diplomat, political scientist, and historian, best known as "the father of containment" and as a key figure in the emergence of the Cold War....
 once said that "the policy of the government of the United States is to seek . . . to preserve Chinese territorial and administrative entity."

The word entitative is the adjective form of the noun entity. Something that is entitative is "considered as pure entity; abstracted from all circumstances", that is, regarded as entity alone, apart from attendant circumstances.

Specialized uses

  • A DBMS
    Database management system

    A database management system is computer software that manages databases. DBMSes may use any of a variety of database models, such as the network model or relational model....
     entity is either a thing in the modeled world or a drawing element in an ERD.
  • A SUMO
    Suggested Upper Merged Ontology

    The Suggested Upper Merged Ontology or SUMO is an upper ontology intended as a foundation ontology for a variety of computer information processing systems....
    , Entity is the root node and stands for the universal class of individuals.
  • In VHDL, entity is the keyword for defining a new object.
  • An SGML
    SGML entity

    In Standard Generalized Markup Language and its derived markup languages HTML and XML, an entity is a named body of data associated with a document, or the unnamed document entity itself....
     entity is an abbreviation for some expanded piece of SGML text.
  • An open systems architecture
    Open systems architecture

    Open systems architecture, in telecommunication, is a standard that describes the layered hierarchical structure, computer configuration, or model of a information transfer or distributed data processing system that:...
     entity is an active routine within a layer.
  • In computer games and game engine
    Game engine

    A game engine is a software system designed for the creation and development of video games. There are many game engines that are designed to work on video game consoles and desktop operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X....
    s, entity is a dynamic object such as a non-player character
    Non-player character

    A non-player character, often shortened to NPC, is a fictional character that is controlled by the gamemaster in role-playing games. When this definition extends to video games, an NPC in a video game is usually part of the computer program, and not controlled by a human....
     or item
    Item

    Item may refer to:* * Item, entry in a list, or one object in a collection of objects.* Item, the name of a town in Abia State of Nigeria.* Collector's item, an object or item of any kind that has become valuable...
    .
  • In HTML
    HTML

    HTML, an Acronym and initialism of HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for Web pages. It provides a means to describe the structure of text-based information in a document?by denoting certain text as links, headings, paragraphs, lists, and so on?and to supplement that text with interactive forms, embedded '...
    , entity is a code snippet (ie: "®" for "Registered Trademark") which is interpreted by web browsers to display special characters. See List of XML and HTML character entity references
    List of XML and HTML character entity references

    In SGML, HTML and XML documents, the logical constructs known as character data and attribute values consist of sequences of character s, in which each character can manifest directly , or can be represented by a series of characters called a character reference, of which there are two types: a numeric character reference and a ...
    .
  • In law
    LAW

    LAW may refer to:* Anti-tank warfare, e.g. the US Army M72 LAW or the British Army LAW 80*Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights ...
    , a legal entity
    Legal entity

    Note: This Wikipedia entry deals with the legal concept legal person. There is an ongoing political debate and controversy in the United States over the extent to which constitutional rights presumed to have been created for natural persons have increasingly been asserted by corporations and other legal persons, popularly referred to as cor...
     is an entity that is capable of bearing legal right
    Right

    Rights are legal or moral entitlements or permissions. Rights are of vital importance in theories of justice and deontology.Many contemporary notions of rights are Universality and egalitarianism, with equal rights granted to all people....
    s and obligation
    Obligation

    An obligation is a requirement to take some course of action, whether law or morality. There are also obligations in other normative contexts, such as obligations of etiquette, social obligations, and possibly...
    s, such as a natural person
    Natural person

    In jurisprudence, a natural person is a human being perceptible through the senses and subject to physical laws, as opposed to an Legal person, i.e., an organization that the law treats for some purposes as if it were a person distinct from its members or owner....
     or an artificial person (e.g. business entity or a corporate entity).

See also

  • Boltzmann brain
    Boltzmann brain

    A Boltzmann brain is a hypothesis self aware entity which arises due to random fluctuations out of a state of chaos. The idea is named for physicist Ludwig Boltzmann , who had advanced an idea that the known universe arose as a random fluctuation, similar to a process through which Boltzmann brains might arise....
    , a hypothesized self-aware entity.
  • Digital identity
    Digital identity

    Digital identity refers to the aspect of digital technology that is concerned with the mediation of people's experience of their own identity and the identity of other people and things....
  • Entity realism
    Entity realism

    Entity realism is a philosophical position within the debate about scientific realism. Whereas traditional scientific realism argues that our best scientific theories are true, or approximately true, or closer to the truth than their predecessors, entity realism does not commit itself to judgments concerning the truth of scientific theories....
    , a form of scientific realism
    Scientific realism

    Scientific realism is, at the most general level, the view that the world described by science is the real world, as it is, independent of what we might take it to be....
    .
  • Ontology
    Ontology

    Ontology in philosophy is the study of the nature of being, existence or reality in general, as well as of the basic category of being and their relations....
    , the study of being, existence and entities
  • Object (philosophy)
    Object (philosophy)

    In philosophy, an object is a thing, an entity, or a being. This may be taken in several senses.In its weakest sense, the word object is the most all-purpose of nouns, and can replace a noun in any sentence at all....