Most elegant UI for categorizing items?

Question

I have a collection of items that the user needs to group/categorize in several ways. For the sake of an example, let\'s say it\'s a collection of cars and the user wants to cat

Answer 1

It seems like an issue that needs to be addressed especially for having users classify dimensional data into further, more simplified, dimensions (groups or categories whatever you want to call them) so that they can visualize the data better via the simplified categories/dimensions.

The user needs to be able to import a list, and both create dimensions for the list and then categorize the list intuitively based on those dimensions. Creating the dimensions would consist of naming/renaming the dimension (name of column) and then adding/renaming/removing the categories (column items) of that dimension. It should be seamless to switch between creating new dimensions and actually categorizing the list items individually or in bulk using the new dimensions created by the user. The user could then export the list with the additional column or columns (dimensions) containing the newly created categories.

The idea is that it would be much more user friendly that just having a table and adding columns to it. Ideally you would be able to select items in the list, and then assign them a validated category item from the user created dimension list which would auto-populate a read-only table that could be exported. Input = list, Output = comprehensively categorized list. No spreadsheet required.