As there is a lot to this question I can only give you a vague answer to keep it short. The type of communication I recommend using is NSURLConnection. That will allow you to get the contents of say an xml from a URL.
As far as identifying individual users there is a few ways all of them a fair bit of work. You could create a sign in where the user has a unique username or email. Store that in the database on your server and pass it as part of the url.
You could also sort of use push notification registration where your server is required to keep an iPhone unique identifier to push information to Apple. I don't know enough to push notification to give you much guidance in this but if you don't want the user to create an account I think this would be the way. You could also query the server for a unique ID and store it in NSUserDefaults.
I would recommend the user account creation though. Also have a look at NSXMLParser for your xml parsing.
Beyond this help ask a more specific question. There are also many other ways to do this, its just the way I do it.