Unified Modeling Language Reference Manual, The, Second Edition

refinement

A relationship that represents a fuller specification of something that has already been specified at a certain level of detail or at a different semantic level.

See abstraction.

Semantics

A refinement is a historical or computable connection between two elements with a mapping (not necessarily complete) between them. Often, the two elements are in different models. For example, a design class may be a refinement of an analysis class; it has the same logical attributes, but their classes may come from a specific class library. An element can refine an element in the same model, however. For example, an optimized version of a class is a refinement of the simple but inefficient version of the class. The refinement relationship may contain ...