Entity type creation in ontology (preview)

Entity types represent real-world concepts such as Truck, Sensor, or Customer. They define standard names, descriptions, identifiers, and properties to ensure consistency across data sources and tools. By modeling your domain with entity types, you eliminate inconsistent column-level definitions and create a shared semantic layer that powers downstream experiences like analytics and AI agents. You can create entity types manually or import them from existing business logic in semantic models.

Prerequisites

Before creating entity types, make sure you have the following prerequisites:

• A Fabric workspace with a Microsoft Fabric-enabled capacity.
• Ontology item (preview) enabled on your Fabric tenant.
• An ontology (preview) item.
• Understanding of core ontology concepts.
• Understanding of the data binding process from Data binding.

Key concepts

Entity types use the following ontology (preview) concepts. For definitions of these terms, see the Ontology (preview) glossary.

• Entity type
• Entity type key
• Entity instance
• Property
• Data binding

Create an entity type

Follow these steps to create entity types in your ontology (preview) item.

1. From the Home configuration canvas, select Add entity type from the top ribbon or the center of the canvas.

   

2. Enter a name for your entity type, and select Add Entity Type.

   Note

   Entity type names must be 1–26 characters, contain only alphanumeric characters, hyphens, and underscores, and start and end with an alphanumeric character.

3. The configuration canvas displays your new entity type.

   

Add properties

This section shows how to create properties on entity types without binding data to them (the properties remain unbound until you add data bindings for them later). It's also possible to add properties while binding data in a single operation, which is described in Data binding.

1. Select the entity type name in the Explorer and select View entity type details from the top ribbon.

   

2. The Configure page opens. This page surfaces important information about the entity type, including its properties and data bindings. Expand Manage property bindings and select Add properties.

   

3. Add a name and property type for each property. Select Save to view the saved properties in the Properties pane.

   

   Note

   Property names can only be duplicated across entities for properties of the same type. For example, you can't have one entity type with a string ID property and another entity type with an integer ID property, but you can have two entity types that both have a string ID property.

4. The properties are added to the Configure page, unbound to any data source.

   

5. Optionally, select a property to use as the display name property for instances of this entity type in downstream experiences.

   

6. To make the entity type operational, bind data to it.

Edit or delete an entity type

To delete an entity type from in your ontology (preview) item, go to the Home configuration canvas. Next to the entity type name in the Explorer, select ... > Delete entity type.

To edit details of the entity type, select View Entity type details from the top ribbon to open the Configure page.

From this page, you can add, rename, and delete properties, and rename or delete the entity type itself.

Deleting a property removes it from the entity everywhere it's configured, including entity type key and relationship type configurations.

Supported property types

The following table lists the supported property types for data that can be bound to properties in ontology (preview).

The following table shows supported source column value types that can be used for the timestamp selection in a time series binding.

The following table shows supported property types that can be used as the entity type key.

If your data contains other data types, perform ETL to convert the data to one of the supported types before bringing the data to ontology.