Need database of categories for products and services

Need to develop a database schema that associates products and services into industry-standard categories. I know that both the schema and data are out there, yet I'm not finding it.

There are databases that list products (and contain millions of records), but I'm not finding a good database that lists corresponding categories. For example, individual cell phones might be in a "cell phone" category which, in turn might be in the "consumer electronics" category. What would be good sources of these types of categories?

Classification is a really tricky thing -- a company that specializes in cell phones might have many categories of cell phones, while ones that don't might stop at a broader category. Even within a given company, they might have multiple ways of looking at things, and so have multiple classification schemes / taxonomies / thesauri / ontologies / knowledge organization systems in use.

Just like any database, you have to know what sort of questions you're going to ask of your classification scheme, and from there, you can design what's going to fit it best.

A few registries / repositories / lists that I know about :

• Taxonomy Warehouse

• TaxoBank

• JISC Directory of Metadata Vocabularies

• TemaTres Vocabulary Server

• Controlled Vocabulary Examples

You might also check to see if whatever organizations there are for your industry have any standard classification scheme / thesauri / ontologies / whatever.

Update : I don't know if the Global Product Classification might help or not.

StackExchange Database Administrators Q#1589, answer score: 4