Entities & owners

Owners, resolved entities, and how Signa links company records across offices

An owner is one office’s record of an applicant or registrant, exactly as that office filed it. An entity is the same company’s identity across every office: it links together the owner records that belong to it.

Party types

Type	Prefix	What it is
Entity	ent_	The cross-office identity linking the owner records that belong to the same company.
Owner	own_	A single office’s applicant/registrant record, as that office filed it.
Attorney	att_	Named attorney of record on a trademark.
Firm	firm_	Law firm associated with the attorney.

Attorneys and firms appear on the trademark records they’re associated with. Owners and entities each have their own API surface, described below.

Owner or entity?

Use owners when you need the exact per-office record: the name as filed, the office, the address on file. Use entities for company-level questions, such as “everything this company owns, everywhere.”

GET /v1/owners/own_abc123
GET /v1/entities/ent_R3jK9mN2

Every owner also has an entity view, even before it has been linked to anything else: if it isn’t linked yet, its entity has exactly one member (itself). Once it is linked, the same request returns the combined entity instead, so you can always traverse from a mark to its company-level identity without checking whether a link exists first.

Endpoints

Endpoint	Purpose
GET /v1/entities	Search and filter resolved entities
GET /v1/entities/{id}	One entity with members and link evidence
GET /v1/entities/{id}/trademarks	Global portfolio across all members
GET /v1/entities/{id}/family	GLEIF corporate parent and subsidiaries
GET /v1/owners	Search and filter owners
GET /v1/owners/{id}	A single per-office owner record

How linking works

The same company often files under a different legal entity, a different language, or a different level of detail in each office. For example, Procter & Gamble’s US, German, and Swiss records share almost no text a name match could use, but a shared Madrid registration number ties them together into one entity.

Signa links owner records, it never merges them. The per-office data is never rewritten, so own_ IDs stay stable even as new links are added later. Two owners are linked only on specific, verifiable evidence: a shared applicant identifier, a shared Madrid international registration, or a shared public company. A name match alone is never enough, since two unrelated companies can share an identical name.

Each member on a resolved entity carries how it was linked:

curl -s "https://api.signa.so/v1/entities/ent_R3jK9mN2" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer sig_YOUR_KEY" | jq '.members[].link'

TypeScript

import { Signa } from "@signa-so/sdk";

const signa = new Signa({ api_key: process.env.SIGNA_API_KEY });
const entity = await signa.entities.retrieve("ent_R3jK9mN2");
console.log(entity.name, entity.member_count, entity.tickers);

Each link exposes a method (shared_identifier, international_registration, public_company, portfolio_overlap, or manual_review), a coarse match_strength band, and whether it was reviewed.

Only entities can be superseded, never owners: if two resolved entities are later found to be the same company and combined, requesting the old ent_ ID returns 410 Gone with the successor ID in merged_into so you can update your reference.

Public-company enrichment

Owners and entities can be linked to public-company facts from two sources:

Source	Coverage	Identifier
SEC EDGAR	~10,000 US-listed companies	Ticker (CIK internally)
GLEIF	~2.5M legal entities worldwide	LEI

These facts are aggregated onto the entity, so it carries a company’s ticker even when only one member owner was matched. Filter either surface by them:

Filter	Description
ticker=AAPL	Linked to this stock ticker. Subsidiary-inclusive: ticker=NKE returns Nike and its subsidiary entities
lei=HWUPKR0…	Linked to this LEI
publicly_traded=true	Publicly listed: a confirmed active SEC ticker match, or the entity is itself listed or a subsidiary of a listed company
has_lei=true	Has a confirmed GLEIF LEI match

An entity that is a subsidiary of a listed company carries the inherited ticker on its tickers array, with the direct-vs-inherited provenance broken out in the entity’s listing block (status is listed or subsidiary_of_listed, source is direct or inherited). See Track any public company’s trademarks for the full recipe.

GET /v1/entities?publicly_traded=true&country_code=US&sort=-trademark_count

Owner-to-public-company matching is confirmed-positive only: a false or absent value means no match was found, not that the company is confirmed private.

Corporate families

Using GLEIF Level 2 relationship data, Signa connects an entity to its direct corporate parent and subsidiaries:

GET /v1/entities/ent_R3jK9mN2/family

TypeScript

const family = await signa.entities.family("ent_R3jK9mN2");
console.log(family.parent?.name, family.children.length);

GLEIF Level 2 covers LEI-reporting companies only. An absent edge does not imply the absence of a corporate relationship; see coverage_caveat on the response.

FAQ

Why did the entity ID I requested come back with a different id?

You requested an owner’s single-member entity view before it was linked to anything else. Signa transparently resolves it to the real entity once a link exists and returns that id. This is expected: store the returned id.

Do owner IDs ever break?

No. Owners are linked, not merged, so own_ IDs are stable. Only entities are ever combined; when that happens the old ent_ ID returns 410 Gone with a pointer to its successor in merged_into.