"Florin X Mateoc" <mateoc_florin at jpmorgan.com> wrote:
	"The ability to capture and transmit semantic and structural data made possible
	by XML ..."
	
	Now, could you please enlighten me how would XML (and its metadata siblings) do
	all this without modelling the world ?

XML _can't_ do that.

XML + XSchema gets closer.  Basically, XSchema is a data type declaration
system which lets you attach some semantics to trees as well as constrain
their form.  (I don't _like_ XSchema, but it does attempt some of the
relevant things.)  However, what it is modelling is not the _world_,
but the semantic and structural data of a _document_.

RDF, which is an application of XML, is (waving hands vaguely)
an interchange format for binary relational databases, so to the extent
that relational databases can be said to model the world, so can RDF.
Some parts of RDF and some parts of XSchema seem to be talking about
similar things, but they're not really integrated.

"X is a model of Y" is really an abbreviation for
"There is some person P who uses X together with other stuff Z for
modelling some aspects of Y".  "What the information IS" is
"whatever person P says it is".