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In particle physics, strangeness is the number of anti-strange quarks minus the number of strange quarks in a particle. The reason for this unintuitive definition is that the concept of strangeness was defined before the existence of quarks was discovered, and for consistency with the original definition the strange quark must have strangeness -1, and the anti-strange quark must have strangeness +1.
Strangeness is conserved during the strong interaction and the electromagnetic interactions, but during the weak interactions associated with particle decay it is changed by 1 in either direction; isospin is conserved only during the strong interactions.
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