An entity is something that has a distinct, separate existence, though it need not be a material 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 In particular, abstractions and legal fictions are usually regarded as entities. --> Abstraction is the process or result of generalization by reducing the information In the Common law tradition legal fictions are suppositions of fact taken to be true by the Courts of Law, but which are not necessarily In general, there is also no presumption that an entity is animate. Life is a state that distinguishes Organisms from non-living objects such as non-life and dead organisms being manifested by growth through Metabolism 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 subsets. In philosophy, such sets are said to be abstract objects. Philosophy is the study of general problems concerning matters such as existence knowledge truth beauty justice validity mind and language For other uses see Abstract In Philosophy it is commonly considered that every object is either abstract or concrete

Sometimes, the word entity is used in a general sense of a being, whether or not the referent has material existence; e. Disambiguation For the Wigwam album see Being (album, for spiritual or religious beingness, see Ego (spirituality g. , is often referred to as an entity with no corporeal form, such as a language. It is also often used to refer to ghosts and other spirits. A ghost is said to be the apparition of a Deceased person frequently similar in appearance to that person and usually encountered in places she or he frequented Taken further, entity sometimes refers to existence or being itself. For example, the former U. S. diplomat George F. Kennan once said that "the policy of the government of the United States is to seek . George Frost Kennan (February 16 1904 &ndash March 17 2005 was an American Advisor, Diplomat, Political scientist, and Historian, best . . 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.

In law, an entity is something capable of bearing legal rights and obligations. Law is a system of rules enforced through a set of Institutions used as an instrument to underpin civil obedience politics economics and society A right is a legal or moral Entitlement or Permission. Rights are of vital importance in theories of Justice and deontological ethics An obligation is a requirement to take some course of action whether legal or moral. It generally means "legal entity" (such as a business entity or a corporate entity) or "artificial person" but also includes "natural person". Note This Wikipedia entry deals with the legal concept legal person. Note This Wikipedia entry deals with the legal concept legal person. In Jurisprudence, a natural person is a human being perceptible through the senses and subject to physical laws as opposed to an artificial legal or juristic person

Specialized uses

• A DBMS entity is either a thing in the modelled world or a drawing element in an ERD. A database management system ( DBMS) is Computer software designed for the purpose of managing Databases DBMSes may use any of a variety of Data models An entity-relationship model (ERM is an abstract conceptual representation of structured data
• A SUMO, Entity is the root node and stands for the universal class of individuals. The Suggested Upper Merged Ontology or SUMO is an upper ontology intended as a foundation ontology for a variety of computer information processing systems
• In VHDL, entity is the keyword for defining a new object.
• An SGML entity is an abbreviation for some expanded piece of SGML text. In SGML and its derived Markup languages HTML and XML, an entity is a named body of data associated with a document or the unnamed document
• An open systems architecture entity is an active routine within a layer. Open systems architecture, in Telecommunication, is a standard that describes the layered hierarchical structure configuration, or model of a communications
• Zionist entity is a pejorative term for Israel
• In computer games and game engines, entity is a dynamic object such as a non-player character or item. Zionist entity is a term used primarily in the Arab world as a pejorative euphemism for the State of Israel. For a topic outline on this subject see List of basic Israel topics. A personal computer Game (also known as a computer game or simply PC game) is a Video game played on a Personal computer, rather A game engine is a software system designed for the creation and development of computer and video games A non-player character, often shortened to NPC, is a character that is controlled by the Gamemaster in Role-playing games or one that is not ITeM stands for the Instituto del Tercer Mundo (or the Third World Institute which is based in Montevideo the capital of Uruguay
• In HTML, entity is a code snipet (ie: "®" for "Registered Trademark") which is interpreted by web browsers to display an ASCII character. HTML, an initialism of HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant Markup language for Web pages It provides a means to describe the structure

See also

• Ontology, the study of being, existence and entities
• Entity realism, a form of scientific realism. In Philosophy, ontology (from the Greek, genitive: of being (part Entity realism is a philosophical position within the debate about 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
• Boltzmann brain, a hypothesized self-aware entity. A Boltzmann brain is a hypothesized self-aware entity which arises due to random fluctuations out of a state of chaos