DOYLC

Rob brings up a good point in his comment on The Problem of Abstraction in Definitions of Data ( http://definitionsinsemantics.blogspot.com/2011/12/problem-of-abstraction-in-definitions.html ).  He notes that what I am describing is not really abstraction but really a number of different things. Today it seems the term "abstraction" is used in all kinds of situations when talking about data.  For me, it is often difficult to figure out what "abstraction" is supposed to mean in any one of these situations.  I strongly suspect that at least sometimes it does not really mean anything.  Sometimes I suspect it is even used for marketing hype. The entry for "abstraction" in Baldwin's Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology describes how abstraction is filtering out of attributes from an instance or a concept to achieve a particular view of the instance or concept.  Rather poetically the entry describes how a child looks at a body of water and becomes fascina...