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

Understand

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.