The tragic part isn't that the schema is given in XSD but that it's defined in XSD. What I'm lamenting (yes more hyperbole) is that a schema this important wasn't defined in a schema language that had clear semantics and composability rules, fostering reuse and adoption for related domains, of which we would expect there to be many. (Later, of course, the definition could always be extruded into XSD and other popular yet semantically stunted formats as a practical publication step.)
Fair enough. I haven't really dug into this schema in detail yet, but I'm guessing that XSD is expressive enough, and that - worst case - somebody could define an equivalent schema in $WHATEVER, and mirror the data after tranforming it. It's not a perfect setup, but at least it might make the content more usable for some purposes.
I'm kinda curious to see what can be done with it in terms of transforming to RDF triples myself, but time will tell...
