&quot;No connection between RDF and XML&quot; is definitely not true.<p>(1) RDF uses the XSD types for literals,  and (2) you can turn an XML document very directly into an RDF graph with interconnected nodes.<p>Once you have done that you can go to &quot;plain&quot; RDF with simple production rules instead of insanely complex XSLT.  That is,  250 lines of XSLT goes down to 10 lines worth of rules.