What is an entity?

Answer 1

In VHDL, entity is the keyword for defining a new object. In SGML and its derived markup languages HTML and XML, an entity is a named body of data associated with a document. Once defined, an entity can be referenced any number of times within the document, via entity references. An entity typically consists of a sequence of one or more characters, either encapsulated within a declaration of the entity's existence, or encoded and stored externally in a text file. Such entities and their references are comparable to macros and include files in programming languages. However, entities don't necessarily have to contain parseable text; they may also be binary files that are included in a document only by reference, with the entity name as the value of an ENTITY-type attribute.

Answer:

An entity is something that has a distinct, separate existence, though it need not be a 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. 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.

Sometimes, the word entity is used in a general sense of a being, whether or not the referent has material existence; e.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. 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 . . . to preserve Chinese territorial and administrative entity.

Answer:

An entity is a legally recognized and formally structured grouping of people focused on some common cause or objective.

Examples

Here are some examples of entities:

SIL

an SIL branch

UNESCO

Answer 2

According to Avison and Shah (1997), an entity type is a collection of entity instances sharing similar properties; and 'relationships' associate or relate instances from one entity type with some of the instances of another entity type.

Reference: David Avison & Hanifa Shah, 1997, Information Systems Series - The Information Systems Development Life Cycle: A First Course in Information Systems, London; McGraw-Hill