The categorizing of unstructured content into thematic "buckets." For example, a story on Tiger Woods could be classified as a story about sports, golf, a Buick spokesperson, a Stanford graduate, a multimillionaire, and a Black American. Categorization is typically automated in some way; applications differ in the amount of work required and manual control offered.
The process of describing an item of content (or content item) such as an image, piece of text, or audio for example using metadata. By providing data about the content, metadata facilitates the use and reuse of it in a variety of different contexts and for different purposes.
The process of assigning metadata to content. Categorizing content includes determining whether a content element is related to, for example, Sports or Finance, Hockey or Stocks. Metadata associated with categorized content is used to generate navigational links to relevant content (for example, a list of links to all Hockey articles for a self-described Hockey fan).