Entities
Almost every question worth asking about markets is about something — a company, a person, a commodity, a country, an institution. Entities are how Ultralayer makes that "something" a queryable object rather than a string-matching exercise.
The principle: identity over strings
"Tesla", "Tesla, Inc.", "TSLA", and "the EV maker led by Elon Musk" are one identity wearing four costumes. Text search treats them as four different things; an entity model treats them as one. Every entity has a canonical name — the display form you'll see in results (Tesla, Inc., Federal Reserve, Brent Crude). Filter the Wire by an entity, pull a dossier, read mentions on a wire item — same identity everywhere.
Entities are deliberately broader than a ticker universe. The things that move markets are not all listed companies:
| Type | Examples |
|---|---|
| Companies | Tesla, Inc., easyJet plc — public and private |
| People | Elon Musk, executives, policymakers |
| Commodities | Brent Crude, Gold |
| Countries | Iran, United States |
| Institutions | Federal Reserve, central banks, agencies |
Grounded mentions, not keyword hits
When content is ingested, the entities it discusses are extracted and grounded against the registry of known identities. A mention is a structured judgment, not a substring match:
- Relevance — is this entity the
primarysubject of the item, asignificantparticipant, or a passing mention? Filtering on relevance is the difference between "news about Tesla" and "news that says the word Tesla." - Mention-level sentiment — how the item treats this entity specifically, from −1 to 1. One headline can be positive for the acquirer and negative for the target; per-mention sentiment captures that, where a single document-level score cannot.
This is what powers precise monitoring: "items where Apple is a primary subject with strongly negative sentiment" is a three-filter query, not an NLP project.
An evolving system
Entity systems are never finished — new identities appear daily, and deciding whether two names are the same real-world thing is a genuinely hard problem. Expect the registry to keep improving: identities get merged as duplicates are found.
Occasionally you'll see near-duplicate identities side by side (e.g. a company under two name variants in co-mention lists). Collapse them when briefing.