Tailoring Information to the Needs of Clients

The vision of providing clients with information that is tailored to their needs has sparked off a tremendous interest in languages that are on the one hand standardized and hence widely applicable but which are on the other hand also highly flexible and can hence be customized to specific applications. The universal exchange format XML (eXtended Markup Language) is a candidate for such a language but we argue that it does not go far in solving the problems of integrating information from different sources and being provided or used by different actors especially across organizational boundaries. We therefore show existing approaches of enriching XML with application-specific semantics and argue why these are not applicable in many cases. This leads us to introduce a process-oriented method for effectively informing clients on the basis of XML by tailoring documents to their specific needs.