RE: Fwd: [MODS] MADS: XML schema for authorities

RE: MADS

> Converting this schema to a useful RDF is algorithmically impossible 
> since too much information is kept implicit and/or optional.

I don't think its impossible - for example of how to do it, see the enclosed
XSLT stylesheet which demonstrates how to convert the examples. 

Writing XML in this way is quite a useful design pattern for getting
RDF-like extensibility in XML while retaining compatibility with things like
WSDL based web services, where we have to write an XML Schema to describe
our data. Writing such a schema limits our ability to add extensions, so one
way to overcome this is to use attributes to encode property names, as this
frees us from the schema constraint. Of course once we are free of the
schema constraint, then we lose our ability to validate, but then that's a
problem we have with RDF as well. 

Mark