So, does XOBIS achieve the goals we used as guidelines for its development? We believe it presents a sound structure and is good initial attempt at accomplishing those goals.
While the XOBIS schema may be complex, this ensures that XOBIS records do not have to be. This is, in contrast, I believe, to MARC, whose structure is relatively simple, but whose content often gets too complex.
Part of the difficulty some might have with following the schema results in our use of generic elements. Rather than define a similar data structure differently in a variety of contexts, we chose to define it once and resuse it. While this increases the consistency of the schema, it sometimes makes following the schema's "web of references" a bit confusing.