On mapping from colloquial XML to RDF using XSLT

XML vocabularies can be characterized as those designed for the convenience of authors or software developers, called colloquial, and those designed to have a trivial mapping to a non-XML data structure, which we call non-colloquial. Mapping colloquial vocabularies into other formats (e.g., symbolic logic or RDF) is a powerful tool for making colloquial XML tractable. Specifying this mapping is a way of documenting what the elements and attributes are supposed to mean and how they are to be used. If this is done only in English prose, humans can make use of it, but not machines. If machine-readable syntax is used to specify a mapping from the XML vocabulary into some well-known target syntax, the mapping can benefit both humans and machines. Simple examples illustrate how mappings can be defined using XSLT and how they can be attached to the schema defining the XML vocabulary.