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Hi Ethan, I will defer to those with greater insight, into what has been discussed earlier in this thread, than myself as to some of the semantics you are trying to crystallise here. What I can offer instead is a bit of advice as to lubricating the process. Firstly, stay as far away from XML as possible whilst trying to shape your model/ontologies - it a) introduces hierarchical thinking/visualisation in to what may well not be a problem of hierarchy, b) is difficult to read, c) in the world of RDF, best reserved for machine to machine communication. Secondly, put away the computer and get out the white/blackboard and pen. Start drawing some ellipses, rectangles, and arrows. When you have a model that looks something like the real world you are trying to represent (not the traditional metadata records you previously held), transform that in to a form of RDF that a computer will understand. This is an approximation of the process the British Library used to work their way towards their data model<http://dataliberate.com//wp-content/uploads/2012/01/British-Library-Data-Model-v1.01.pdf> for the British National Bibliography. Oh, and the XML? - Let a tool like Raptor produce it for you from the more human friendly turtle you come up with. ~Richard. On 13 February 2012 21:43, Ethan Gruber <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > Hi Patrick, > > Thanks. That does make sense. Hopefully others will weigh in with > agreement (or disagreement). Sometimes these semantic languages are so > flexible that it's unsettling. There are a million ways to do something > with only de facto standards rather than restricted schemas. For what it's > worth, the metadata files describe coin-types, an intellectual concept in > numismatics succinctly described at > http://coins.about.com/od/coinsglossary/g/coin_type.htm, not physical > objects in a collection. > > Ethan > -- Richard Wallis Founder, Data Liberate http://dataliberate.com Tel: +44 (0)7767 886 005 Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/richardwallis Skype: richard.wallis1 Twitter: @rjw IM: [log in to unmask]