Application-oriented networks are sometimes called "intelligent networks" or "content-based routing networks" and they are generally network technology that can use the content of a network packet or message to take some sort of action. During the rise of the internet many routing decisions were made at layer 4 i.e. based on the TCP/IP address and/or the port number.

Application-oriented networks work at layer 7 of the OSI stack and because they can examine the content of the message they can make routing decisions based on many different criteria including such things as the value of the purchase order or the ship date.

Most Application-Orientated Networks manipulate structured data based in a human-readable

Human-readable

A human-readable medium or human-readable format is a representation of data or information that can be naturally read by humans.In computing, human-readable data is often encoded as ASCII or Unicode text, rather than presented in a binary representation...

 format like XML

XML

Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....

.