A category is a specific type of information contained in a dataset.

InfoSum's Global Schema defines many possible categories, reflecting information commonly found in our customers' datasets. Here are just a few examples of predefined categories:

• Name
• Age
• Market Value Of Property
• Date Of Vehicle Insurance Renewal

You can also define your own custom categories for data which doesn't fit in any of the predefined categories.

As a rough approximation, you can think of each category as a column in InfoSum's Global Schema. But don't take that too literally - categories have many capabilities that ordinary database columns don't. In particular, a single category can have several different output formats, called representations.

As part of the process of normalizing your data, you assign your original columns to categories. By doing this, you tell InfoSum Platform what each column in your dataset means.

Several columns in your original data can map onto a single category. For example, you might have individual columns for Street Address, City and Postal Code (or zip code). All of these together would map onto a single category, Address.