Entity Manager

Modified on Tue, 7 Jan at 4:16 PM

Schema App's External Entity Linking feature provides a fast and scalable way to automate Entity Linking in your Schema Markup. While it has an accuracy rate of >80%, it's important that your highest priority entities are accurately defined. Schema App's Entity Manager puts the "human in the loop", giving you full control over the entities returned by External Entity Linking.

Use the Entity Manager to edit an entity's properties for improved accuracy, or block entities from deploying to eliminate irrelevant or redundant data. By fine-tuning your knowledge graph, you can maximize performance, improve content quality, and gain more meaningful insights from your semantic data layer.

This article explains how to prioritize and manage your entities.

IMPORTANT:

Projects with active External Entity Linking tags can manage up to 5 entities
Projects on the Entity Hub package can manage all entities

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Identifying which Entities to Manage
Editing and Blocking Entities
- Entity Manager Properties
Resetting Entities
Additional Resources

Identifying which Entities to Manage

The External Entity Linking feature may identify 10s, 100s, or even 1000s of entities within your content. In order to prioritize which entities need to be managed we recommend using the Entity Reports' Entity View. This report lists all of the identified entities, the location and frequency of their identification, and their type and sameAs values. For more information, see our Entity Reports documentation.

Use the Entity View report to answer the following questions:

Step 1. Which entities are most important to my organization?

Depending on your Organization's vertical, you may already know which entities are most important to manage.

Examples include:

Example	Schema.org Type
Your organization	https://schema.org/Organization
Partner, affiliate, or suborganizations	https://schema.org/Organization
Products or services	https://schema.org/Thing
Areas of expertise	https://schema.org/Thing
Founders, authors, or experts	https://schema.org/Person
Service areas	https://schema.org/Place

Use the search box to validate whether the entity has been identified. Note that there may be variants of the entity with the same, or similar names. Prioritize the entity with the highest URL count. This brings us to question 2:

Step 2. How frequently is the entity being identified?

The Entity View report loads entities by descending URL count. The URL count is the number of webpages where this entity has been identified and embedded in the Schema Markup.

The image below shows the top entities identified on Schema App's account are Google, JSON-LD, and Schema.org. These are expected since our content will almost always touch on one of these three entities. If the top entities being returned are a surprise, this may indicate that some should be blocked or edited.

Step 3. Is the entity Type correct?

Start by looking at how your most important entities have been typed. If the returned type is unexpected, you may want to edit that entity. This is also a good indicator that the Same As values should be validated.

The image below shows Schema.org is typed as Organization which isn't wrong because that is technically the name of an Organization. However, "Schema.org" could also be referring to the vocabulary they created which would be typed as Thing, so further investigation of this entity is a good idea.

Step 4. Are the sameAs values correct?

The sameAs property is used to link the identified entity to authoritative knowledge bases that have also described that same entity. Each of these values is a URI that should resolve to a URL where you can validate whether the entity is being mapped correctly.

Our Schema.org entity has been identified in Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Google's Knowledge Graph.

Wikipedia example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema.org

Wikidata example: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3475322

Google's Knowledge Graph example: https://www.google.com/search?kgmid=/m/0gvvdn9&hl

Editing and Blocking Entities

The Entity Manager can be accessed from the main menu, or from within the Entity View report by clicking Actions > Edit Entity.

To begin managing your entity, click "Overwrite Entity".

Entity Manager Properties

The following properties can be edited for each entity in the Entity Manager:

Preferred Label

This is the name of the entity. Modifying the name will not change what the entity maps to in your content, only the name that is returned in the Schema Markup

Same As

The sameAs property is used to link your entity to URIs that represent the same entity elsewhere on the web. External Entity Linking may return sameAs values for Wikidata, Wikipedia, and/or Google's Knowledge Graph.

Visible

This property dictates whether or not an entity is blocked from being embedded in your Schema Markup. All entities are set to "Include" by default, but can be blocked by changing the status to "Exclude" in the Entity Manager. Entities can also be blocked from within the Entity View report by clicking Actions > Block Entity.

Type

The Schema.org type of the Entity as determined by the External Entity Linking API. External EL identifies entities with the following schema.org types:

Note: The External Entity Linking API is able to identify entities typed as Product and Event. However, since these types can be eligible for Rich Results, they trigger errors in Google Search Console. As a result, we have chosen to type Product and Event entities as Thing to prevent errors from appearing in Google Search Console enhancement reports. We recommend using a similar approach when modifying entity Types in the Entity Manager.

Resetting Entities

All changes made to an entity can be undone by clicking the Reset button. Resetting an entity will revert all properties to what was originally returned by the External Entity Linking API. This action cannot be undone, so make sure you've verified whether you're resetting the correct entity before confirming the Reset process.