Comprehensive and Comprehensible Data Catalogs: The What, Who, Where, When, Why, and How of Metadata Management

Data management tasks require access to metadata, which is increasingly tracked by databases called data catalogs. Current catalogs are too dependent on users' understanding of data, leading to difficulties in large organizations of users with different skills: catalogs either make metadata easy for users to store and difficult to retrieve, or they make it easy to retrieve, but difficult to store. In this paper, we present 5W1H+R, a new catalog mental model that is comprehensive in the metadata it represents, and comprehensible in that it permits all users to locate metadata easily. We demonstrate these properties via a user study. We then discuss practical guidelines for implementing the new mental model. We conclude mental models are important to make data catalogs more useful and to boost metadata management efforts.