Before doing any entity engineering work, it's worth establishing a baseline: does an entity record for your business, organisation, or topic already exist somewhere in structured knowledge bases — even one that's incomplete, outdated, or that you didn't create?
Why this matters before doing anything else
It's surprisingly common for an entity record to already exist — created by someone else, generated automatically from another data source, or established years ago and then forgotten. If a record already exists, the priority shifts from "create" to "find, correct, and align" — a different (and often easier) task than starting from nothing.
Conversely, if no record exists, you're starting from a genuinely blank slate, which has its own considerations — particularly around how new entities are appropriately added to collaboratively maintained structured sources.
What to look for
A useful starting point is searching for your business or entity name directly within major structured knowledge bases, rather than just searching the open web. The presence or absence of a result, and — if present — how complete, accurate, and well-categorised it is, tells you a great deal about where you're starting from.
It's also worth checking whether any existing record correctly identifies your entity's type, includes accurate core properties, and is connected to relevant related entities (location, category, parent organisation, and so on) — an existing record that's poorly categorised or disconnected may need almost as much work as creating one from scratch, just of a different kind.
What to do with what you find
If a record exists: the next step is usually correcting and completing it, then ensuring your site's alignment schema references it accurately. If no record exists: the next step is understanding the appropriate process for establishing one — which, for collaboratively maintained knowledge bases, involves following the conventions covered elsewhere in this series, rather than simply submitting promotional content.