Kategoorimine

Kategoorimine, or categorization, is the process of organizing items into groups, or categories, based on shared features, relations, or intended use. In Estonian usage the term describes both cognitive classification and practical data organization, and it is used across fields such as information science, libraries, museums, and digital media. The goal is to improve searchability, comparability, and interoperability by assigning items to predefined categories or by identifying natural groupings that arise from the data.

Categories can be defined in advance, forming a taxonomy or controlled vocabulary, or emerge from data through unsupervised methods or user-driven tagging. Manual categorization relies on explicit criteria and expert or user judgment, while automated approaches apply algorithms to assign items to categories. Supervised learning uses labeled examples to predict categories; unsupervised learning discovers clusters without preexisting labels; rule-based systems apply explicit, human-written rules. Many systems also combine approaches, using metadata, keywords, or tags to support the process.

Applications are widespread. Libraries and archives use controlled vocabularies to index materials; e-commerce platforms classify products for navigation and search; content management systems rely on categorization to organize articles and media; data mining and knowledge graphs use categorization to structure information.

Challenges include ambiguity and polysemy, evolving vocabularies, multilingual and cross-cultural differences, and the ongoing maintenance of taxonomies. Kategoorimine remains central to information retrieval and knowledge organization, balancing precision with flexibility to adapt to new data types and user needs.