esentia

Esentia is a term used in philosophy and information science to denote the set of essential properties that define the identity of an entity, distinguishing core attributes from contingent features. The coinage blends the Latin root essence with a modern suffix and has been used to discuss the nature of objects and persons in debates on essentialism.

In philosophy, esentia refers to the theorized essence that makes an entity what it is, potentially persisting across change. In computer science and knowledge representation, esentia has been adopted to describe a stable subset of an object's attributes that remain invariant across contexts, facilitating robust reasoning, similarity assessment, and ontology design.

Implementation often involves modeling esentia as a vector or structured set of attributes that are deemed necessary for identity. This enables lightweight queries, efficient indexing, and improved interoperability between datasets, as non-essential attributes can be ignored for certain tasks. Esentia-compatible approaches are used in entity linking, semantic search, and AI explainability to help systems focus on core attributes when making inferences.

Criticism notes that essentialist notions may oversimplify complex entities and that determining esentia is context-dependent. Proponents argue that differentiating essential properties improves interpretability, robustness, and transferability of reasoning systems.

See also: Essentialism, Essence, Ontology, Knowledge representation, Entity linking.