Instantiation

Instantiation or instance may refer to:

Philosophy

• A modern concept similar to participation in classical Platonism; see the Theory of Forms
• The instantiation principle, the idea that in order for a property to exist, it must be had by some object or substance; the instance being a specific object rather than the idea of it
• Universal instantiation
• Existential fallacy, also called existential instantiation
• A substitution instance, a formula of mathematical logic that can be produced by substituting certain strings of symbols for others in formulae

Computing

• Instance can generally refer to any running process, or specifically to an object as in an instance of a class
• Table instance (or database instance), a concept in database design; see Row (database)
• Instantiation of an object
• Instance can refer to a single virtual machine in a virtualized or cloud computing environment that provides operating-system-level virtualization

Library science

• Instantiation of a class or object within the organization of a Body of knowledge.
• For example, the instantiation class taxonomy within the Wikimedia project Wikisource generally refers to language classes.

Other uses

• Instance dungeon, a feature of many online videogames