Meanings of the word "model"

Not an answer, but a brilliant debate: Breiman, Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures.

From topic-models mailing list, link

“A model which, given a certain choice of subset from or probability distribution over a finite, discrete set of things called topics, gives you back side information which allows significantly better compression of some subset of some given data than any other choice or no side information at all.”

From Hand et al's Principles of Data Mining, section 1.3: "A model structure, as defined here, is a global summary of a data set" (e.g. a linear regression), as opposed to a pattern: "pattern structures make statements only about restricted regions of the space spanned by the variables" (e.g. a probabilistic rule: if X > x1 then P(y) > p1).