Compare methods

	Domain Analysis	Knowledge Organization System Design
Field	Library Information Science	Library Information Science
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1995	2000
Originator	Birger Hjørland & Hanne Albrechtsen	Elaine Svenonius; ANSI/NISO Z39.19
Type	Socio-cognitive pipeline for studying knowledge domains	Design pipeline for specifying a knowledge organization system
Seminal source	Hjørland, B., & Albrechtsen, H. (1995). Toward a new horizon in information science: Domain-analysis. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 46(6), 400-425.	Svenonius, E. (2000). The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN: 9780262194334
Aliases	Knowledge-Domain Analysis, Hjørland Domain Analysis, Discourse-Community Analysis, Subject-Domain Analysis	KOS Design, Knowledge Organization System Engineering, Information Organization System Design, Bibliographic Language Design
Related	3	3
Summary	Domain analysis is the socio-cognitive research programme proposed by Birger Hjørland and Hanne Albrechtsen in 1995, which holds that the most fruitful object of study for information science is the knowledge domain understood as a discourse or thought community within society's division of labour. Rather than grounding information organization in the isolated mental processes of an individual user, domain analysis grounds it in the shared literature, paradigms, terminology, and social practices of a subject field. Hjørland and Albrechtsen set out eleven complementary approaches — from producing literature guides and special classifications to bibliometric, historical, and epistemological study — and Clare Beghtol's work on literary warrant and consensus showed how a domain's own published discourse supplies the empirical basis for its categories. The method turns the design of classifications, thesauri, and retrieval systems into an evidence-based study of how a community actually thinks and writes.	Knowledge organization system (KOS) design is the principled specification of the artefacts — classification schemes, thesauri, subject heading lists, taxonomies, name and subject authorities, and ontologies — that organize recorded information for retrieval. Elaine Svenonius's The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization recast this work as the design of bibliographic languages, each with a vocabulary, a semantics, and a syntax, all justified by the user objectives an information system exists to serve: to find, identify, select, and obtain. KOS design begins from those objectives and the entities a domain contains, then specifies controlled vocabulary, fixes the mapping between terms and concepts, defines the syntax for combining terms, and evaluates the result against the objectives and against design principles. Standards such as ANSI/NISO Z39.19 supply the construction rules for the vocabulary layer.