What is the purpose of the the parent category field on a model category?

[CMDB Whisperer]

In recent versions of ServiceNow, they have introduced the Parent Category field on the Model Category table, but is unclear to me what the intended use of this is, both how it's supposed to be used and why it was added.

At face value, I could interpret this field in two different ways:

1) The parent category is the category whose CI class is an ancestor of the CI class of the child category.

For example, the parent CI class of cmdb_ci_server is cmdb_ci_computer, and therefore the parent category of Server would be Computer.  Not sure what the purpose of that would be.  Is this for categories that are tracked as assets but not CIs, so you can still provide a type-based hierarchy?  Or in case your CI class hierarchy is deeper than your category hierarchy and you might want to skip a level?

2) The parent category is the category that is expected to be used by the parent asset.

For example, if a hardware asset of category Blade Server is expected to have a parent hardware asset of type Blade Chassis, and therefore the parent category of Blade Server is Blade Chassis?  I could see why this might be useful, but I can't find any functionality that is tied to this.  

If I had to guess, it would be option 1.  But in either case I could not find anything to indicate how this is specifically supposed to be used and I'm not sure if there is any value in updating the existing model categories to have parent categories.

[Jyo2]

Were you able to get an answer for this @CMDB Whisperer ?

[CMDB Whisperer]

Never got an answer.  Not sure if anything has changed.  Best I can figure out is that is was one of those things that seemed logical.  And it technically is.  It makes logical sense that the parent category of Server would be Computer, just as it is in the CMDB Class hierarchy.  But the question is, does setting this actually do anything?  Is there any benefit to defining hierarchical model categories?  To my knowledge the answer is no.