Glossary for Geospatial Science

category:  (in Feature Mapping)  A subdivision within a region of interest (which also has a particular meaning in reference to Feature Mapping) that lets you divide the study site so that the measurement data in the output text file will be organized geographically.  So, if you have defined a region of interest as the wetland duck habitat along a river floodplain, you might want to divide the wetlands into categories: perhaps ownership areas (like refuge lands, private ownership, and easement areas).  Then the text output file would break down the wetland feature measurements by ownership area.  If you do not define categories, TNTmips treats the entire region of interest as a single category (and does not subdivide the feature measurements in the output data). 

Do not confuse the terms “categorical data” and “category”—they have different and distinct meanings.