to study the knowledge-domains as thought or discourse communities, which are parts of society's division of labor.
Knowledge organization, structure, co-operation patterns, language and communication forms, information systems, and relevance criteria are reflections of the objects of the work of these communities and their role in society. The individual person's psychology, knowledge, information needs, and subjective relevance criteria should be seen in this perspective
The core of the domain analytic approach is to study the activities and products of domains to gain insights into
“already there” structures and meanings.
The assumption is that domains produce artifacts that can be used to study them.
It can furthermore be argued that an understanding and analysis presumes and includes an understanding and analysis of the users' information needs and information usages.
An understanding of the domain informs decisions made about information related activities,
e.g. design of information systems,
construction of controlled vocabularies,
strategies for evaluation,
and indexing of documents.