Tailoring Information to the Needs of Clients Peter Rittgen Technical University Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany rittgen@bwl.tu-darmstadt.de Abstract 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. Many players in the XML industry want us to believe that XML alone will solve most of the problems associated with informing clients. But do the principal concepts of XML, which were already introduced almost three decades ago in the context of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), really justify this optimism? We argue that, although XML will play a major role in informing systems, 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 show the use and importance of (electronic) documents in informing systems and from there we motivate the general usefulness of a common language such as XML for describing documents in a uniform way and hence making it easier to exchange them between different actors. We go on showing existing approaches of enriching XML with application-specific semantics and arguing 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. 1. Introduction Few technologies have inspired so much enthusiasm, in both the academic and the professional world, as the universal data exchange format XML. New languages based on XML or XML tools are introduced on a weekly basis. Some of the advertisements of suppliers convey the impression that XML marks the beginning of a whole new era in computation. When we take a closer look we discover that the underlying concepts are neither new nor do they support excessive optimism. Nevertheless, it is beyond dispute that XML will play an important role in many organizations in the near future. This development is fuelled by the rapidly spreading use of XML for defining exchange formats in e-business and the increasing number of cheap or even free-of-charge tools that support creating, managing and processing XML documents including, for example, concepts and tools that allow for a tight integration of XML with HTML and Java. To provide for a systematic and effective use of XML we first have to identify potential areas of application. XML was developed to support the exchange of information between informing systems. If we look at a single organization we already find that different systems are used by groups (e.g. departments) or even individuals within the organization. But these systems do not exist in complete isolation: they support sub-processes that eventually contribute to achieving a common goal. To do so they have to share information.