Skip to content

Mention Meta

Mentions are specific instances of a person, organization or location appearing in the story. Each mention carries a fixed piece of metadata, known as its nature, which describes the role of the entity in the story.

Field Controlled vocabulary? Purpose
**nature** Yes — values depend on entity_type Primary editorial role of the mention

Nature by entity type

Different canonical types carry different natures for their mentions.

Entity Reference
People People
Organizations Organizations
Locations Locations

Discover values in your project

Call Mention facets for distinct natures and type values on mention rows in your project — a convenience wrapper for frontend search UI:

curl "https://api.{organization_slug}.backfield.news/public/v1/projects/general/mentions/facets" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer bfk_your_project_api_key"

The natures array merges values from all entity types. Use the entity pages above to interpret which entity type each value applies to.

Filtering by nature in API requests

Many public routes accept a repeatable nature query parameter. Repeat the parameter to match any listed value (OR). For example, ?nature=subject&nature=official on a person mention list returns mentions tagged with either role.

Connection lists use the same repeatable pattern for relationship nature values.