Assignment of items to defined groups based on common attributes, relations or other criteria
Note 1: Items that are subject to classification may include documents, records (such as incident records or change records), services, configuration items (CIs), etc. Defined groups may include categories (such as incident categories or change categories) or priority levels.
Note 2: The act of classification often comprises the application of more than one classification scheme. For instance, an incident record might be assigned to a technical incident category such as ‘software related’, ‘network related’, etc., and also to a priority level like ‘low priority’, ‘medium priority’, etc. The assignment of various incidents, service requests, changes and problems to an affected CI is also a classification.
Note 3: Besides the presentation and analysis of relationships, classification is often used as input for controlling the workflow of a process, e.g. by assigning a priority level to an incident.