Variety of Basic Metadata

• Cookies - small text files that are stored on a user's computer by a Web server explicitly permitted to do so by the user's browser software.

  • An identifier used by the Web site that placed it on your disk.
  • Can contain any arbitrary information the server chooses and are used to introduce state into otherwise stateless transactions.
  • Typically used to authenticate or identify a registered user of a web site as part of their first login process or initial site registration without requiring them to sign in again every time they access that site.
  • Other uses are maintaining a "shopping basket" of goods selected for purchase during a session at a site, site personalization (presenting different pages to different users), and tracking a particular user's access to a site.