It is a schema to define people, organizations, and geographical locations which can be involved in creating or publishing a creative work, publication, or artifact.
It can reference controlled vocabularies or registries, such as Virtual International Authority File (VIAF), Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID), or the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN).
MADS was originally formulated as an XML schema, but it also has an expression in Resource Description Framework (RDF), called MADS/RDF.
MADS/RDF expresses and makes statements about Authorities and their Variants, which are controlled records, and distinguishes these from the real-world objects (RWOs) they describe.
However, they found that they couldn’t present the full structure of authorities such as the LC Subject Headings (LCSH) in a general-purpose form such as SKOS.