I am interested in producing status information about a room with as little configuration as possible, with status information such as:
- Are the lights on or off?
- What is the (average) temperature and humidity?
- Is motion active or inactive?
To do this I was expecting to be able to use the room assigned to each device and then look for devices of the appropriate capabilities to produce the output I want, e.g. find all the lights in room X and check their status to tell if the lights are on in room X, similarly for temperature / humidity sensors and motion sensors.
Each of these have solutions already, there are built-in and/or Community developed apps to provide the status for groups of devices, but these require configuration and on-going maintenance by the user as devices are added.
There is also the complication of device capabilities. These, quite rightly, drive the interaction between apps and the device, defining the actions that can be performed and the information that is expected to be available for the device. But there are many different capabilities that could be used to represent / control lights, including Light or Bulb, but also switches, such as a virtual switch I setup to represent LED candle lights I control via my Logitech Harmony in RM.
So what I am suggesting is the option to record 1 or more categories against each device, such as, from my examples:
- Light
- Temperature Sensor
- Humidity Sensor
- Motion Sensor
Devices like a Hue Motion Sensor or Samsung/Aeotec Multi-Sensor would have more than one category assigned due to the multiple sensors contained in the one device.
Developers of drivers, be they Hubitat or Community developers, could allocate categories as defaults for devices that use the driver, but users could also override the settings once the device is installed. An ability to override the categories would allow for removing devices from the list of temperature sensors if they are not seen as indicative of the room temperature or not accurate.
When creating a virtual device a user would get the option to set the categor(ies), so in my case, creating a virtual switch and assigning the Light category.
Obviously there would be more details to flesh out with this type of request, but would be interested in peoples thoughts.... And no, I'm not trying to get some type of tagging system in under another name 
A defined set of categories for this specific purpose may be required.
EDIT - I will most likely use @thebearmay 's device note for this purpose to begin with, but was hoping to make use of something more dynamic for the kind of app I was wanting to create, so as devices are added there is less maintenance for the user.
I'd definitely like a column or filter for category in the device list. Anything to be able to finally drop label prefixes.
