ontrolled vocabularies are a common component in applications of linked data in order to connect digital resources. There are applications in the Humanities and digital editions, too. Two scenarios are described in some detail. The first concerns the analysis of annotations on manuscripts of Aristotle’s De interpretatione. In conjunction with transcriptions, the usage of authority files in metadata as well of domain specific vocabularies helps in this example to find stemmatological relations between glosses and diagrams in some of the manuscripts. The second example is not about a text-critical application but about the creation of the thesaurus for a commentary on Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens, that is a multimodal, figurative and dense written book by today’s standards. The question is raised as to what extent a controlled vocabulary with its concepts and the implicit semantics of the relations between them can be of a heuristic value for the reconstruction of this historical, alchemical concepts in its dynamics and alterity.
