LOV stands for Linked Open Vocabularies. This name is derived from LOD, standing for Linked Open Data.

A vocabulary in LOV gathers definitions of a set of classes and properties (together simply called terms of the vocabulary), useful to describe specific types of things, or things in a given domain or industry, or things at large but for a specific usage. Terms of vocabularies also provide the links in linked data, in the above case between a Person and a City. The definitions of terms provided by the vocabularies bring clear semantics to descriptions and links, thanks to the formal language they use (some dialect of RDF such as RDFS or OWL). In short, vocabularies provide the semantic glue enabling Data to become meaningful Data.