Reification is a process through which a computable/addressable object—a resource—is created in a system, as a proxy for a non computable/addressable object. By means of reification something that was previously implicit, unexpressed and possibly unexpressible is explicitly formulated and made available to conceptual (logical or computational) manipulation. Informally, reification is often referred to as "making something a first-class citizen" w...
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Reification is a process through which a computable/addressable object—a resource—is created in a system, as a proxy for a non computable/addressable object. By means of reification something that was previously implicit, unexpressed and possibly unexpressible is explicitly formulated and made available to conceptual (logical or computational) manipulation. Informally, reification is often referred to as "making something a first-class citizen" within the scope of a particular system. Some aspect of a system can be reified at language design time—this is related to reflection in programming languages; reification can be applied as a stepwise refinement step at system design time; reification is one of the most frequently used techniques of conceptual analysis and knowledge representation.
In linguistics, reification corresponds to a well-known phenomenon called nominalization, which consists in turning a verb into a noun, for example "move" → "movement", "be a member" → "membership"....
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