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

• Main Authors: Subramaniam, Pranav, Ma, Yintong, Li, Chi, Mohanty, Ipsita, Fernandez, Raul Castro
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 12-03-2021
• Subjects: Computer Science - Databases
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2103.07532

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.