Patent ID: 7469246

Claim:
A method for associating an item with at least one category selected from a collection of more than one hundred categories, the method comprising: providing a collection of more than one hundred categories, each category including a model, each model determining a process, each process determining a degree of closeness to a set of features of items; receiving an item; determining a set of features associated with the item; identifying two or more categories in the collection of more than one hundred categories that relate to the set of features, the step of identifying comprising using the set of features with a process of each category in the two or more categories to determine how well the set of features matches said each category; forming a blended model from the identified two or more categories to derive a blended process such that the blended process yields a closer fit to the set of features of the item than that of any single process of a category from the collection of categories; and associating the item to each of the two or more categories that were used to form the blended process, wherein the item becomes associated with fewer than ten of the categories.