Open catalogue

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Open catalogue is open content or free content in the form of catalogues, i.e., structured databases with information about products or other stored items in a standardized format. A catalogue implies categorization or classification of the items involved, and database normalization 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) for the Open ICEcat project, which resulted in an open catalogue for product information, often used by merchants as input for their mail-order catalogue.