---
title: "Entities"
description: "How entities work on Minima"
---

> Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.minima.ltd/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Entities

## What is an entity?

An entity represents something distinct and identifiable in the real world, like a person, a product, or a place.

Each entity has a type, like `Product` or `Person`, which determines the properties it can have.

:::note
If you're at all familiar with [Schema.org](https://schema.org), these concepts might feel familiar.
:::

## What is a property?

A property is either an attribute, or a relationship.

## What is an attribute?

- A `Person` has a `Name`, and a `Birth Date`.
- A `Book` has a `Release Date`, and an `MSRP`.
- An `Organization` has a `Founding Date`.

## What is a relationship?

- A `Person` is the `Author` of a `Book`.
- An `Organization` is the `Publisher` of a `Book`.

:::note
These are just examples, you define your own entity types on Minima.
:::

## Defaults

Minima is a content management system, so every entity has some default fields which you don't need to define.

- Name
- Slug, a unique identifier for use in permalinks
- Status, which is one of Draft, Submitted, Published, or Archived
- External URL, to store an official website, product page, or other canonical URL for the entity

## How publishing entities works

While articles belong to a single site, entities are a bit different – they belong to your organization.

Why?

A good example is a publisher of multiple sites, including one site about gadgets and another about video games.

Both are likely to cover Sony and/or its products regularly.

It doesn't make sense for the editors of both sites to have to define Sony, the `Organization`, as an entity.

That defeats the purpose of having a CMS with a knowledge graph in the first place.

There are two layers of publishing an entity.

1. Setting the entity status to published

If an entity is published, it can be appear in responses from the public API of any site in your organization.

For example: Sony can appear as the `Manufacturer` of the `PlayStation 5`.

2. Giving the entity a permalink on a site

If you'd like Sony to have a publicly-available URL on a particular site in your network, like `https://[site].com/company/sony`, you can decide which sites in your network have a [permalink](/content/permalinks) for it.

Source: https://docs.minima.ltd/content/entities/index.mdx