Modern facet analytical theory contrasts with earlier views of knowledge as an integral whole (which is broken down into smaller and smaller units) in that it deals with individual terms or concepts which are clustered into categories to create a 'bottom-up' map of knowledge.
N. Nakashole, G. Weikum, and F. Suchanek. Proceedings of the 2012 Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning, page 1135--1145. Stroudsburg, PA, USA, Association for Computational Linguistics, (2012)