A user may wish to find an element in a model but not be familiar with the names or terminology used by the model's authors. In this case, he or she may use a term he or she knows for a concept hoping to find an element in the model that corresponds. The vocabulary in use for this concept may specify a single preferred term for any concept/model element, but may also specify non-preferred terms as synonyms. It may list these in a display of model elements, or it may support queries that use these synonyms and return the model element, labelled with the preferred term.

A user authoring a model wants to add a new element and name it using a preferred term from the vocabulary that has been chosen for this model. He or she either looks at a list of terms available in this vocabulary with an interface that may distinguish preferred terms from synonyms, or he or she may use familiar terms to query the vocabulary to find the concept matching the new model element. If these terms are in the (active) vocabulary (either as preferred or non-preferred terms/aka synonyms), the tool should return information about the corresponding MVFEntry such as PreferredTerm, Definition, Synonyms. When and if the desired concept is found through this process, the modeling tool will use its own mechanism to link this MVFEntry to the new model element.