What is "overcategorization"

n. The act, process, or result of overcategorize.

Overcategorization, overcategorisation or category clutter is the process of assigning too many categories, classes or index terms to a given document. It is related to the Library and Information Science (LIS) concepts of document classification and subject indexing.

In LIS, the ideal number of terms that should be assigned to classify an item are measured by the variables precision and recall. Assigning few category labels that are most closely related to the content of the item being classified will result in searches that have high precision, I.e., where a high proportion of the results are closely related to the query. Assigning more category labels to each item will reduce the precision of each search, but increase the recall, retrieving more relevant results. Related LIS concepts include exhaustivity of indexing and information overload.