The recent expansion of the Internet and invention of the XML (Extensible Markup Language) data format has created both the opportunity and the need for businesses to exchange information, and to interoperate in a uniform way that has not been achieved nor been possible before except in isolated segments within the business community.

Today's economic practices often create businesses and business processes formed from many incompatible systems. The need to integrate and exchange data within a company is as profound as it is between companies. Much of the data being exchanged are operational: data that enable transactions, determine the course of business processes, and in the aggregate, become business intelligence data that affect decisions of business leaders.

The XML data format provides a way of regularizing the storage of semi-structured data, historical data, and other information requiring content management. XML can be used to store the content itself and data mined from the content. Data mined from the content can be used to form catalogs, similar in concept to card catalogs in libraries, which contain existence and location information and possibly other interesting summary information. Information mined from content can be stored and used in business or scientific intelligence queries.