Integrated Approach for Category Development

Categories are the most basic structures by which human beings understand, describe, and communicate phenomena and related information about the world (Lakoff, 1987). Geographers construct categories to conceptualize, define, interpret and communicate geographic phenomena, for instance, land cover, vegetation types, soil types, regions of economic growth, and many others. In general, categories are constructed by specific categorization methods based on analyzing data and / or utilizing an expert’s domain knowledge; so categories are not only determined by the underlying conceptualization, but also by a combination of the categorization methods chosen and data used in their construction, and the domain knowledge and experience that are brought to bear dur ing construction. In short, the tasks of defining categories can be summarized into three spaces that encompass human concepts, data, and categorization methods (Figure 1).