What is an entity?

An entity is an element/piece of information belonging to a specific class such as a 'person' or a 'birth'. For example "Amsterdam" is an entity of the class "Geographical Place".

In Geovistory, information is stored in entities. Each entity belongs to a class. For example, the person 'Josef Mayer' belongs to the class 'person'. There are many different classes, which are divided in two main groups: persistent item and temporal entity.

Persistent item classes are for example: person, geographical place or group/organisation. All entities of these classes, like for example 'Josef Mayer' as an entity of the class 'person', exist over time. Persistent items are related to temporal entities/events, which describe them. The person 'Josef Mayer' is naked as such. Only through its relation to temporal entities/events is he been given cloths and colors. In the case of 'Josef Mayer', this might be his 'birth' and 'death', which limit his existence.

The classes of temporal entities include events located in time. Example of temporal entities are events such as a 'birth', 'death' or a 'coronation'. Each of them has taken place at a specific moment in time and may involve persistent items that play a role in that event.

In this section of the manual we will introduce how you can:

• add new and existing entities to your project,

• edit your entities and complement them with information,

• delete entities,

• inspect and navigate through your entities.

This dichotomy of persistent items and temporal entities translates into an event-centered data model for storing Geovistory data.

Each entity class is well defined according to the overarching ontology, giving it a semantic meaning. Here you can read how Geovistory works with ontologies.