Since electronic data interchange (EDI) is one of the most important components in electronic commerce and since Extensible Markup Language (XML) provides Internet developers with a powerful vehicle for exchanging messages, XML/EDI has received much attention from almost all well‐known international enterprises and is believed to be the next generation EDI. However, since XML allows developers to design their own elements and attributes, it is almost certain businesses will receive XML documents with unknown elements. Generally, human intervention is required to solve the problem. Therefore, it is indispensable to design an efficient scheme to resolve the unknown elements. In this paper, we propose a ReScUE XML/EDI model such that transformation templates will be generated automatically for documents with unknown elements, and the documents will be converted into expected format. This model increases the flexibility of XML/EDI systems and reduces human intervention. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.