categorist

A categorist is a person who engages in categorization—systematically organizing items, ideas, or data into categories, classes, or taxonomies. The practice involves identifying distinguishing features, determining criteria for inclusion, and establishing hierarchies or relations among categories. The term is not widely used as a professional title in most industries; it is more of a descriptive label for anyone who performs categorization as part of their work or study.

In information management, librarians, archivists, and information architects act as categorists when designing classification schemes, metadata schemas, and navigation structures. In data science, analysts and data engineers may adopt categorization practices to build feature taxonomies, ontologies, or label sets for machine learning. In education or cognitive science, researchers study how people form categories and how categorization affects memory and reasoning.

Philosophically or theoretically, categorist may appear in discussions about the role of categories in knowledge or perception, though this usage is uncommon and not standardized. More common terms within respective fields include taxonomist, classifier, categorizer, or category theorist (in mathematics).

See also categorization, taxonomy, ontology, information architecture.