label

A label is information attached to an object to identify, describe, classify, or instruct. Labels can be physical, such as a tag on a product or a care label on clothing, or digital, such as metadata on a file or tags assigned to a record. They help people and machines recognize and handle items correctly.

In commerce and manufacturing, labels convey content and compliance: ingredients, warnings, nutrition facts, trademarks, barcodes, and regulatory statements. Clothing labels provide size and care instructions. Hazardous materials labeling uses standardized pictograms and hazard statements. Labels may also support inventory and logistics, such as SKU numbers and shipping information.

In data science, a label is the target value or category assigned to a data instance, used to supervise machine learning models. Labeling can be manual, semi-automated, or crowd-sourced. Quality control measures, such as agreement among annotators, help ensure accuracy, since mislabeled data can undermine model performance and evaluation.

Beyond physical goods and data, labels organize information in software and information systems—tags or categories that enable filtering, search, and navigation. In version control and release management, labels or tags mark specific milestones or artifacts. Labels thus function as a general mechanism for identification, classification, and action across many contexts.