Reification (information retrieval)

In information retrieval and natural language processing reification is the process by which an abstract idea about a person, place or thing, is turned into an explicit data model or other object created in a programming language, such as a feature set of demographic or psychographic attributes or both. By means of reification, something that was previously implicit, unexpressed, and possibly inexpressible is explicitly formulated and made available to conceptual (logical or computational) manipulation.

Source: Wikipedia — Reification (information retrieval) (CC BY-SA 4.0)