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.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Ranganathan, S. R. (1967). Prolegomena to Library Classification (3rd ed.). Bombay: Asia Publishing House. · ISBN 9788170004707
- Vickery, B. C. (1960). Faceted Classification: A Guide to Construction and Use of Special Schemes. London: Aslib. · ISBN 9780851420103
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.