Metadata for a Recipe Collection was one of my first efforts to explore information structure and systems in the culinary domain.

As the grand finale to a class about the structure of information, this paper examines possible metadata formats that could be applied to recipes in a personal recipe collection. The paper is based upon the following scenario: An amateur cook wishes to convert an unwieldy personal collection of recipes from a variety of print forms into a WWW-based archive. The recipes will be turned into WWW compatible form by scanning or hand entry, a potentially laborious challenge not to be addressed in this paper. The WWW archive will contain full text records of the recipe, not a surrogate that points to the recipe located elsewhere. Ultimately, the WWW-based recipe archive will be superior to the traditional paper recipe collection because it should be easier and faster to search, more durable, and can be shared with fellow cooks via the Internet. The selection of a metadata standard that best represents a recipe as an information object is the topic of this paper.