Facet Analysis

Facet analysis is the analytico-synthetic technique, pioneered by S. R. Ranganathan and systematized for special schemes by Brian Vickery, for decomposing a subject into its fundamental conceptual components. Instead of trying to enumerate every compound topic in advance, the analyst breaks a subject down into elementary concepts (isolates), sorts those isolates into a small number of fundamental categories — in Ranganathan's canonical scheme Personality, Matter, Energy, Space, and Time (PMEST) — and arranges each resulting facet as an ordered array. A defined citation order then prescribes how facets recombine, so any compound subject can be synthesized from its parts. Facet analysis is the conceptual engine beneath faceted classification, thesaurus structure, and much modern metadata, taxonomy, and interface design.