Controlled vocabulary

Definition

A restricted list of words or terms for some specialized purpose which a community or organization has agreed up

Description

Controlled vocabularies provide a way to organize knowledge for subsequent retrieval. They are used in subject indexing schemes, subject headings, thesauri, taxonomies and other forms of knowledge organization systems. Controlled vocabulary schemes mandate the use of predefined, authorised terms that have been preselected by the designers of the schemes or by indexers, in contrast to natural language vocabularies, which have no such restriction.