Ranganathan’s schema of fundamental categories (preceded by
Kaiser’s categories) carries this to such an extent
that it became the model for analytico-synthetic
KOS. Following the Ranganathan’s approach several
schemes of categories and associated syntactic rules
were developed including those by B.C. Vickery,
G. Bhattacharyya, Derek Austin, Jason Farradane
(although Farradane came up with a schema of
categories of syntactic relations (and not categories
of concepts, his approach is analytico-synthetic
in nature), and others. The British Classification
Research Group (CRG), while adopting Ranganathan’s
technique of Facet Analysis rejected his schema
of categories.
To them the nature and number of
categories was more an empirical issue and was
largely a function of the discipline. While most KOS
employ some synthetic devices, those that do not
extensively employ syntactic categories came to
be referred to as enumerative KOS.
In terms of relationships expressed, most traditional KOS are
restricted to expressing ‘Equivalence’ (Synonymy),
‘Hierarchical’, and ‘Associative Relations (Lateral
Relations)’. Traditional KOS continue to be widely
used especially in libraries, national bibliographies
and even in many structured bibliographic databases.
What is however important to note is that the
processes of building and applying traditional KOS
have largely remained manual and will continue to
be so. In other words these are labour intensive
and do not scale well.