Open catalogue

Open catalogue is an open content catalogue or free content catalogue, a structured database with information about products or other stored items in a standardized format. A catalogue implies categorization or classification of the items involved, a taxonomy per category or class, 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 was first used by 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. A DTD for the Open Catalog Exchange Format of Open Icecat is developed by Sergey Shvets and Dimitry Mitko.