Open catalogue is an open content

Open content

Open content or OpenContent is a neologism coined by David Wiley in 1998 which describes a creative work that others can copy or modify. The term evokes open source, which is a related concept in software....

 catalogue or free content

Free content

Free content, or free information, is any kind of functional work, artwork, or other creative content that meets the definition of a free cultural work...

 catalogue, i.e., a structured database with information about products or other stored items in a standardized format. A catalogue implies categorization

Categorization

Categorization is the process in which ideas and objects are recognized, differentiated and understood. Categorization implies that objects are grouped into categories, usually for some specific purpose. Ideally, a category illuminates a relationship between the subjects and objects of knowledge...

 or classification of the items involved, and database normalization

Database normalization

In the design of a relational database management system , the process of organizing data to minimize redundancy is called normalization. The goal of database normalization is to decompose relations with anomalies in order to produce smaller, well-structured relations...

 to increase the usability of the catalogue for searching & finding, and comparing items within the same category on their main attributes.

The term is first used by Prof. Dr. Martijn Hoogeveen of the Open University (Netherlands)

Open University (Netherlands)

The Open Universiteit Nederland is a Dutch university or institution for distance learning for higher education at university level . This means that students do not attend classes but study at home...

 for the Open ICEcat

Open ICEcat

Open ICEcat is an Open Content project under the Open Content License in which a worldwide open catalogue is created for product information. Editors are participating manufacturers...

 project, which resulted in an open catalogue for product information, often used by merchants as input for their mail-order catalogue. A DTD for the Open Catalog Exchange Format is developed by Sergey Shvets and Dimitry Mitko.

See also

• Open content license
  Open Content License
  The Open Content License is a copyleft license designed for distribution of open content material. This license is not compatible with the any other license in that it requires derivative works to be licensed under the Open Content License....
  
  
• Catalog merchant
  Catalog merchant
  A catalog merchant is a form of retailing. The typical merchant sells a wide variety of household and personal products, with many emphasizing jewelry. Unlike a self-serve retail store, most of the items are not displayed; customers select the products from printed catalogs in the store and fill...
  
  
• Open publishing
  Open publishing
  Open publishing is a process of creating news or other content that is transparent to the readers. They can contribute a story and see it instantly appear in the pool of stories publicly available. Those stories are filtered as little as possible to help the readers find the stories they want....
  
  
• Online shop
  Online shop
  Online shopping is the process whereby consumers directly buy goods or services from a seller in real-time, without an intermediary service, over the Internet. It is a form of electronic commerce...