Hullo.

I'm interested to hear about people's approaches for modeling
repository objects in a normalized, spec-agnostic way, _relational_ way
while
maintaining the ability to cast objects as various specs (MODS, Dublin
Core).

People often resort to storing an object as one specification (the text of
the MODS for example),
and then convert it other specs using XSLT or their favorite language,
using established
mappings / conversions. (
http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/mods-conversions.html)

Baking a MODS representation into a database text field can introduce
problems with queryablity and remediation that I _feel_ would be hedged
by factoring out information from the XML document, and modeling it
in a relational DB.

This is idea that's been knocking around in my head for a while.
I'd like to hear if people have gone down this road...and I'm especially
eager to hear both success and horror stories about what kind of results
they got.

Stephen