kategoorilist

Kategoorilist is a term used in information science to denote a formalized representation of a list of categories and their relationships, intended to standardize how categories are described and exchanged across systems.

Definition and scope: A kategoorilist typically includes a set of category identifiers (often stable URIs), human-readable labels, and multi-level relationships such as parent and child categories. It may also contain synonyms, scope notes, and mappings to external ontologies to enable cross-domain alignment.

Origins and use: The concept emerged from needs in interoperable metadata, taxonomy management, and knowledge graphs. In practice, a kategoorilist functions as a reusable reference that can be attached to items in digital libraries, repositories, and catalogs to ensure consistent categorization.

Structure and formats: A kategoorilist can be serialized in JSON-LD, RDF, XML, or other interchange formats. Key features include versioning, provenance metadata, and mechanisms for mapping between different taxonomies.

Benefits and challenges: Advantages include improved search and navigation, consistent faceted filtering, and easier cross-system data exchange. Challenges include governance, ongoing maintenance, label drift, and the complexity of mapping heterogeneous taxonomies.

Applications: digital libraries, e-commerce catalogs, media archives, and knowledge graphs.

See also: taxonomy, ontology, metadata, controlled vocabulary.