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.

翻译：数据管理任务需要访问元数据，而元数据如今越来越多地由称为“数据目录”的数据库进行追踪。当前的目录过度依赖用户对数据的理解，导致在大型组织中，技能水平各异的用户面临困难：目录要么使元数据易于存储但难以检索，要么使元数据易于检索但难以存储。本文提出一种新的目录心智模型——5W1H+R，该模型在元数据表示上具有全面性，同时允许所有用户轻松定位元数据，因而具备可理解性。我们通过用户研究论证了这些特性，随后讨论了实现这一新心智模型的实践指南。结论指出，心智模型对于提升数据目录的实用性和推动元数据管理工作至关重要。