A controlled vocabulary is a restricted set of terms or naming format for datasets. It is useful for ensuring data meet the [[FAIR]] principles and used in the development of [[ontology|ontologies]]. One example is the [Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/) the NLM controlled vocabulary thesaurus used for indexing articles for PubMed. The [Linked Open Vocabularies](https://lov.linkeddata.es/dataset/lov/) project contains a wide array of interoperable controlled vocabularies.