Abstraction

An Abstraction keeps only the most important information about something in order to make it easier to reuse.

Abstraction is about the ways by which higher, less real concepts are derived from the usage and classification of literal ("real" or "concrete") information.

Abstractions may be formed by reducing the information content of a concept or a phenomenon as viewed, often to keep only the information which is needed for a particular purpose. For example, abstracting a leather soccer ball to the more general idea of a ball will keep only the information about balls in general leaving out anything special about that particular sort of ball. The opposite of the adjective "abstract" is commonly the word "concrete".