http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Derpes
http://www.yelp.com/biz/sushi-gen-los-angeles
Stephen Ramsay’s “Databases” in A Companion to Digital Humanities is a technical description of what databases are and the progression of the design models there have been. Database systems allow “for the efficient storage and retrieval of information”. Without databases, we would have an enormous amount of unsorted data with so much potential, but with no easy way to access particular datasets.
One early problem with databases was that they carried “inefficiencies that often resulted from redundancies in the underlying data representation”. For example, on Urban Dictionary (urbandictionary.com), a open-source dictionary for slang, there are multiples of every word available because everyone has different definitions for the word. The word “derpes” is, according to the first result, is a transmitted disease, but according to the third definition is “a contagious form of right-wing rhetoric”.
Yelp does a fantastic job of eliminating these redundancies. Because I’m from NorCal, I use Yelp every time I want to find a new place to eat at in LA. My boss recommends me a place and I search on Yelp and never find two or redundancies of whatever he suggests. I recently went to Sushi Gen (which I highly recommend), and before I went I yelped it. Sushi Gen popped up as my top search, and when I click on the restaurant, its page comes up with reviews, tips, location, pictures, etc. Every piece of metadata relating to Sushi Gen is attached to that one Sushi Gen; there are not multiple Sushi Gens.
Additionally, “the purpose of a database is to store information about a particular domain (sometimes called the universe of discourse) and to allow one to ask questions about the state of that domain”. Going along the idea that everything is correlated to what you search for on Yelp, you are able to ask questions about the state of that domain. Let’s pretend that I want a solid dinner date place in Santa Monica that is relatively cheap. Yelp’s efficient metadata filters allows me to search “dinner date” and filter it to Santa Monica and two dollar signs. I have many options – “The Misfit Restauarant + Bar”, “Upper West”, “Fritto Misto Italian Café”, the list goes on. Sushi Gen, for example, would be a search result of a highly rated “sushi” place in Little Tokyo that is on the more expensive side. Yelp is a great example of a successful, user-friendly database.