https://www.hersheys.com/reeses/products/reeses-peanut-butter-cups/milk-chocolate.aspx
http://www.fda.gov/Food/ResourcesForYou/Consumers/ucm267499.htm
“Setting the Stage” by Anne J. Gilliland is an introduction to the definition and purpose of metadata. Metadata, or “data about data”, “is understood in different ways by the diverse professional communities that design, create, describe, preserve, and use information systems and resources”. Metadata’s function differs from each metadata standard because Gilliland argues that there is no standard adequate for describing all the collections of data. But it is crucial that metadata is stored and structured in an effective way so the process of retrieving the data is effective, now and in the future. Without the proper storage and maintenance of metadata in databases, it is incredibly difficult to decode information objects and make it public knowledge.
In the early 90s the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) decided to make one of the now most used types of metadata available to the public – nutrition facts. Since 1994 the nutrition fact label has been printed on every sold packaged food product sold in America to help inform customers about the fat, carbohydrates, and sodium content, along with the percentage of daily calories in the given serving size. For example, one of the links above leads us to the nutritional information of a Reeses peanut butter cup. The second link given above is the FDA’s guide on reading a nutrition label. So using the latter to, in a sense, “decode” the nutrition label and turn it into useful data, we find that based on a 2,000 calorie diet, two Reeses peanut butter cups is about 10% of the amount of calories one should be eating per day, 20% of the total fat, 6% of the sodium; the list goes on. Thanks to nutrition fact labels, we know that (unfortunately) eating twenty Reeses peanut butter cups would be doubling the amount of total fat our bodies should be having per day. The nutrition facts act as the metadata, and the labels act as a way to organize this metadata in an effective way so we as consumers now know about exactly what we’re eating.
Another publicly accessibly tool besides the nutrition food label is the database that contains this type of metadata. MyFitnessPal is an open-source database, or record-keeping system, that has most of the world’s nutrition fact labels stored. The web app allows users to add metadata and use the existing metadata to track their daily calories and other nutrition data. MyFitnessPal is an example of giving the public an easy way to access useful metadata to help improve their lives. Nutrition fact labels are an incredibly valuable development, but expanding the storage of metadata in a useful way is the future of informational systems.