How to inspect hidden GIO/GVFS data?

I wish to inspect and edit the binary files in ~/.local/share/gvfs-metadata/. I would like to know what hidden information these binary files contain because they seem to divert my GTK applications (such as Evince) from default behavior. What tool can I use to inspect and edit these binary files? By blind experimentation, I have discovered that if I simply delete all the contents of ~/.local/share/gvfs-metadata/, a GTK application like Evince will resume default behavior, which is nice; but, obviously, this is not the right way to do it. So, what is the right way? I see lots of commands like gvfs-cat(1) and gvfs-mime(1), but cannot figure out what any of these commands have to do with inspecting or editing the aforementioned hidden information. Even if I could just get a human-readable dump (in XML, or whatever) of the binary files, I'd at least know what question to ask next; but the files just sit there, imperturbable. Further information: my $XDG_DATA_DIRS seems to be set to /usr/share/xfce4:/usr/local/share/:/usr/share/:/usr/share. My OS distribution is probably not relevant, but if it is: I run Debian jessie 8.