SGML offers the way to address information at the element level. SGML documents can be kept in an integrated information base, for example, invoices can be associated with orders, inventories, and payment. This feature combined with element level parsing helps in search and retrieval. While SGML has been around for several years it has not gained as of yet a wide acceptance. Its value will be realized only once the users base exceeds a critical mass in terms of the relative document exchange traffic.
Businesses face different problems in processing documents at each stage of the document life cycle.
A typical case in point is the health care industry. The document creation problem gets more involved when the document is created collaboratively by a team dealing with a particular business case. Coordination and control of successive and concurrent changes create the kind of problems that arise in data sharing. Except, that these problems are exaggerated by the nature of document processing. While structured data, such as in a relational database, can be easily segregated at the record level, documents created using conventional technologies cannot.