People and assets (entities)

A tag is a MAC address. An entity is the forklift, the contractor, the oxygen cylinder — the thing you would mention in a sentence. Omaya keeps the two apart on purpose: the hardware is replaceable, the thing it is attached to is what you actually want to follow.

Entities live at Entity in the menu (/admin/manage/entity).

What an entity is

One row per thing you follow, with:

Field	What it is for
Name	What people call it. "Forklift 3", "Aminah (cleaner)", "Cylinder O2-114". Unique within the organisation.
Type	Person or Asset. This is not decoration — Security Watch judges people against their habits, and the privacy tools (DSAR) treat a person's trail as personal data.
Identifier	The number the outside world uses: staff number, badge, plate, asset tag. This is what a data-subject request will be searched by.
Photo, description, labels	For recognising it in a list. Labels are the same free-form labels used on devices and gateways.
Status	Active or inactive. An inactive entity keeps its history but drops out of live views and musters.
Tags	The tag or tags currently assigned to it — see below.

Why not just name the tag?

Because tags get swapped. A tag's battery dies, it gets lost, it goes back in the drawer and comes out on a different pallet. If the name lived on the tag, "Forklift 3" would silently become "pallet 12" and every report about it would be about the hardware.

With an entity, you replace the tag and keep the history. The entity can hold more than one tag at a time (a vehicle with a tag on the dash and one on the trailer), and when a tag is unassigned its past positions stay with the entity they were recorded for.

It is also what turns reports into answers. Dwell time, trail, heatmap and the Entity Tracker all show the entity's name; a tag with no entity shows as a MAC address in all of them.

How to set one up

1. Register the tag first — Devices → Sensor, type tag or asset tag. A model Omaya does not know yet goes through Sensor Onboarding first. An entity can only hold registered tags.
2. Entity → Add. Name it, pick Person or Asset, give it the identifier the outside world uses, and assign the tag(s). Only tags not already on another entity are offered.
3. Walk it past a gateway. The Entity page shows the tag's last sighting; Monitor → Entity Tracker shows where it has been today.

To swap a tag: edit the entity, unassign the old one, assign the new one. Nothing else changes.

Where entities show up

• Monitor → Entity Tracker — one entity at a time: where it has been today, in order, with times. The Entity page itself has the same trail and a live "where is it now" for the row you are looking at.
• Reports — Enter/Exit, Total and Dwell Time can be run for one entity's tag; the Entity page's Reports tab opens them already filtered, and the Device Trail report names the entity on every row.
• Roll Call — a muster expects every active tag device that carries the label staff, employee, human or visitor (if no device carries one of those labels, every active tag is expected), plus every tag bound to a person entity, and marks each present as it is seen at the assembly point. The name it shows is the entity's; a tag bound to nobody musters by its device name, or its MAC address if the device has none.
• Security Watch — incidents about a person ("out of habit", after-hours) name the entity, and the AI's judgement is about that person's usual pattern, not the tag's.
• App users — an app user (a cleaner signing in to the app) can be linked to a person entity, so the app knows where its user is; the user sees the link on their own profile.
• Privacy (DSAR) — a request from a person is searched by name, identifier or email across everything the platform holds; erasing a person entity tombstones the record and deletes their location trail.

Things that go wrong

• "The entity never moves." The tag on it is not reporting — check the device's Last Seen on Devices → Sensor. An entity with a silent tag is a silent entity.
• "Roll call expected 40, we have 55 staff." Fifteen staff have no active tag, or their tag is not labelled staff / employee / human / visitor while others are. The muster counts tags; the entity gives each one its name.
• "Two entities share a tag." They cannot — assigning a tag moves it. If a report shows two names for one MAC, the tag was reassigned mid-day and each name owns the part of the day it was assigned for.
• "I renamed the tag and nothing changed." Names on reports come from the entity, not the device. Rename the entity.