Collections and Categories

Sort of a weird edge case I wanted to ask for some advice.

I've got a set of publications that are published by centers.

If I wanted to filter publications by center would a best practice to be to create a simplified center category set? Or is it "better" to try to filter one collection by another somewhat like author and news collection example?

I'm thinking that having a simplified center category set might make allow more flexibility now and in the future by letting editors tag multiple collections with that center category set rather than set up relationships with multiple collections.

And create a more complex center collection separately.

That way we could group similar centers under one center. This comes up in university setting where one center working on climate change, might want to list all centers in the collection working on climate change (topic).

Is this a good idea to have both a category set and collection for a similar content type to help sorting and filtering? Doesn't seem DRY, but still a workable solution and could get us going quickly.