Abstraction, Classification, and Generalization
No matter the discipline, a modeler ignores some information that is not of interest and groups important information together based on common properties, even though the entities under study are, of course, different from one another. This is where abstraction and classification come into play.
“Abstracts” is the ideologically sound term for just ignoring something (it sounds like a whole lot more work), while “classifies” captures the notion of grouping based on common properties. Both take place in many contexts, but one crucial area is the formalization of knowledge of some universe of discourse in a model.
Suppose, for example, we're faced with a pet store whose owner needs some software to ...
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