The Relationship between Domain Analysis and Knowledge Maps: A Comparative Analytical Study

This study aimed to clarify the concepts of domain analysis and knowledge maps, compare them, analyze the nature of the relationship between them, and identify what artificial intelligence adds to both. The study starts from the observation that the literature usually treats domain analysis within knowledge organization and knowledge maps within knowledge management, and that the term “knowledge map” is used both for maps of organizational knowledge assets and for maps of the knowledge structure of research fields. The study adopted the documentary and comparative approaches through an analytical review of Arabic and English literature and a comparison of the two concepts according to six criteria: purpose, nature, scope of application, main elements, results and outputs, and final function; the relationship between them was then examined in published applications. The results showed that domain analysis is an approach for understanding the structure of knowledge in its social context, that knowledge maps are a tool for representing this structure visually, and that the relationship between them is one of functional complementarity, which is direct in bibliometric studies that produce maps of knowledge domains, and indirect in organizational knowledge maps. The results also showed that artificial intelligence is moving knowledge maps toward knowledge graphs. The study concluded that domain analysis and knowledge maps do not replace each other, and that combining them provides an integrated perspective for understanding knowledge and putting it into practice within organizations: the former is an analytical approach that explains the structure of knowledge and its contexts, while the latter is a representational tool that gives this understanding a practical form. However, making use of this integration involves several challenges, most notably the difficulty of applying domain analysis to interdisciplinary and emerging domains, the difficulty of representing tacit knowledge in maps and the need to update them continuously, in addition to the ethical challenges associated with the use of artificial intelligence. The study recommended using domain analysis and knowledge maps together when designing knowledge organization and knowledge management systems.