Labels: What on earth is an "otaly"?

[Anton]

Yes, I think there are two main options - either they are attributes (such as cold/hot or, as you suggest, a modus operandi) or they designate relationships or "mappings" between different sets of objects. E.g. in a figure, stars are depicted and labeled, where labels are names of (for example) stones, because each star corresponds to a stone (or vice versa).

The third option would be numeric - such as quantities, - but given the vast amount of different labels, this would not sound plausible.