1. The act of collecting information about something which is created by putting together things that have been gathered from various places; gathering, accumulating, assembling, aggregating, and drawing together: The compilation of the contents for this dictionary has taken years of researching and organizing and it is still far from completion.
2. Something, such as a set of data, a report, or an anthology, that is collected, or the process of bringing things together from various places to form a whole.
3. Anything that is produced; such as, reference books, dictionaries, encyclopedias, etc.; which have been made up of material gathered from other printed sources.
4. The production of a new or revised map or chart from existing maps, aerial photographs, surveys, new data, or other sources.
5. The process of translating a high-level programming language into a machine-executable form.