Kategoriaat

Kategoriaat is a term used in information organization to denote a higher-level grouping of related categories within a classification system. It serves as an umbrella that aggregates several categories that share a common theme or criterion, enabling streamlined navigation and discovery.

In practice, a kategoriaat can be created by editors or generated by algorithms. Manual curation identifies thematic connections; algorithmic clustering uses semantic similarity, co-occurrence, or user interaction data. Hybrid methods combine both.

Characteristics include potential non-exclusivity and overlap; membership can be multi-valued; kategoriaat often appear in hub pages, dashboards, and faceted navigation to provide thematic entry points.

Example: In a digital library, a kategoriaat named Environmental Studies might include categories such as Ecology, Conservation, Climate Science, and Environmental Policy.

Relation to other concepts: Kategoriaat complements hierarchical taxonomy, formal ontologies, and thesauri, while also aligning with tag-based folksonomies in flexible navigation. It supports multi-dimensional browsing rather than strict parent-child relationships.

Etymology and usage notes: The term appears as a neologism in information-science discourse, deriving from the word kategoria (category) with the suffix -aat indicating a group or collection. It is used primarily in discussions of alternative or supplementary navigation structures to traditional taxonomies.

See also: Category, Taxonomy, Ontology, Facet, Tag, Navigation design.