Reification means to make something real, bringing something into being, or making something concrete, it is the opposite of abstraction which involves the synthesis of particular facts into one general theory about something. Whereas abstraction removes the specific, reification involves specification, which is the analysis or breaking-down of a general idea or abstraction into concrete, specific facts. For any abstraction to have real-world application it must go through a process of reification and specification in which the detail of the abstraction is specified in order to create a real instance of that form, as all real instances must have a specific form. This process may also be called instantiation.