Unlike views, regular data records don't have an XML arch structure and can't be extended using XPath expressions. But they can still be modified by replacing the values in their fields.
The <record id="x" model="y"> data loading elements actually perform an insert or update operation on model y: if record x does not exist, it is created; otherwise, it is updated/written over.
Since records in other modules can be accessed using a <model>.<identifier> global identifier, it's possible for our module to overwrite something that was written before by another module.