Well-established instruments such as authority files and a growing set of data structures such as CIDOC CRM, FRBRoo, and MODS provide the foundation for emerging, new digital services. While solid, these instruments alone neither capture the essential data on which traditional scholarship depends nor enable the services which we can already identify as fundamental to any eResearch, cyberinfrastructure or virtual research environment for intellectual discourse. This paper describes a general model for primary sources, entities and thematic topics, the gap between this model and emerging infrastructure, and the tasks necessary to bridge it.