Category and filtering help

[eluser]Sceneshift[/eluser]
At the moment I haven't got any category structure in place. I'm trying to figure it out on paper first.

It will literally be case of "Country -> Region -> Area", so that means the category structure would go 3 deep I suppose?

I was thinking of have a "category" table which has a name and a uri_name, so then I can convert "country_region_area" to something readable using a db query. This would mean having a hell of a lot of categories in my database though.

The more I think about it, the more confused I get!