onomasiological?

In lexicography, there are two broad kinds of dictionaries: those based on onomasiological principles (i.e., based on semantic fields and shared properties of meaning, aka thesauri) and semasiological principles (i.e., based on the form of the words or on orthographic or phonological considerations, aka your garden-variety dictionary).

On lexicography as a discipline, you could do worse than finding and reading Ladislav Zgusta's Manual of Lexicography, Mouton, 1971.

Online, I find this page:

http://coral.lili.uni-bielefeld.de/EAGLES/WP5/termdeliv97/node13.html

Those familiar with object-oriented programming may find the discussion of the three major types of relation in onomasiologicy interesting: i.e., taxonomy (is-a), mereonomy (has-a), and predication (has-prop).