In law, an abstract is a brief statement that contains the most important points of a long legal document or of several related legal papers.
[1] The abstract of title, used in real estate transactions, is the more common form of abstract.
An abstract of title lists all the owners of a piece of land, a house, or a building before it came into possession of the present owner.
The abstract also records all deeds, wills, mortgages, and other documents that affect ownership of the property.
[1] In the context of patent law and specifically in prior art searches, searching through abstracts is a common way to find relevant prior art document to question to novelty or inventive step (or non-obviousness in United States patent law) of an invention.