What XML is
XML marks up data with nested named tags and optional attributes. It is verbose, strict about being well-formed, and can carry a schema that says what shape a document must have.
Enterprise integrations, government data feeds, RSS, SOAP services and older document formats.
What RDF is
RDF in Turtle syntax: subject, predicate, object triples describing each row.
Linked data and semantic web projects.
What changes when you convert XML to RDF
The first repeating element is treated as the rows. Attributes are read alongside child elements and prefixed so they do not collide with a same-named tag. Nesting one level deep becomes dotted column names; deeper structures are kept as text.
Each row becomes a subject with one predicate per column, under an example.org namespace you will want to change.
What carries over from XML to RDF
One property of the XML has no home in RDF, and it is worth knowing which before you convert.
RDF wants a type for each column, and XML does not record one, so each column is typed from what its values look like. A column of digits that should stay text - a zip code, a phone number, a leading-zero id - is the usual thing to check afterwards.
An empty cell and a missing one are the same thing in RDF, so a null and an empty string in the XML both come out blank and can no longer be told apart.
The identifier 007 comes out of the RDF as 007. Reading it as a number would have made it 7, and an id that changes value is worse than one that stays text.
The role "Analyst, data" survives with its comma, in one cell rather than split across two. That is the first thing to check in any converted table, and the usual place a RDF file goes wrong.
The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are escaped with a backslash in the RDF.