Certain territorial subdivisions are known as entities.
From medieval Latin entitas , entity is any collectivity that can be considered as a unit . The concept is usually used to name a corporation or company that is taken as a legal entity .
For example: “The Buenos Aires entity declared bankruptcy because it could not assume its financial obligations,” “I work for a renowned entity that has a presence in fourteen countries on our continent,” “The North American player became the new signing of the black and white entity” , “Harsh accusation against the entity chaired by John Smith” .
Entity as territorial division
The term, on the other hand, allows us to refer to certain territorial divisions within a State . A subnational entity can be a province, a community or a region, among other classifications.
The provinces of the Argentine Republic , the autonomous communities of Spain , the cantons of Switzerland , the communes of Chile , the departments of Bolivia and the prefectures of Japan are entities of this class.
The importance, value or essence
Entity is also the value or importance of something . In this sense, when something has an entity, it has a particular relevance: “The minister's accusation has no entity and will soon be forgotten,” “Dr. Filimenti's word has an entity within provincial medicine and must be listened to” , “I am not going to comment on meaningless sayings that only confuse the population.”
For philosophy , the entity is that which constitutes the essence of a thing . In a broader sense, an entity or being is something whose existence is recognized by an ontological system. There are concrete entities (such as people or material objects) and abstract entities (properties, possibilities, thoughts).
The notion of entity is used in the field of computing.
Entity in computing
In computing, more specifically in object-oriented programming, an entity can be defined as a class that has the basic properties of a series of classes that succeed it. Through inheritance , various classes can take advantage of the properties and methods of the same parent class; Depending on the structure proposed by each developer and the characteristics of each language, it is also possible to take the elements of the main class as a basis for the creation of others, generally more complex or specific.
It is very common to use an entity class to declare properties such as position variables in space, with their respective get (to obtain their values) and set (to store new values in them) methods, which will serve as the basis for a large number of objects. In the context of a video game, for example, both an enemy type object and another main character type object can use the same entity class, although both require their own classes to define their particular methods and properties.
Representation of a concept in a database
In the field of databases , an entity is known as the representation made of a concept or an object from the real world in the database itself. Every entity must be described in the database structure (the set of tables and fields with their respective data types, their relationships and restrictions, such as rules to preserve the integrity of the data or to avoid redundancy of data. themselves), following a certain model (a set of concepts used to describe the structure).
If we take a service company as an example, we can say that one of the entities in its database will surely be Customer , which, in turn, will consist of a series of attributes, such as first name , last name , telephone number and email address . In turn, according to the entity-relationship model, it is possible to distinguish between strong entities (those that have the key attributes) and weak entities (that depend on the key attributes of the former).