A subset of natural language that is used to tag documents and then to find content through navigation or search. Use of a controlled vocabulary increases consistency in tagging and can help match users’ natural language with preferred terms. Abbreviated as “CV.”

      Controlled vocabularies exhibit the following relationships:

      Synonym ring
           + Preferred terms =
      Authority file
           + Broader and narrower terms =
      Taxonomy
           + Related terms =
      Thesaurus