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It is shown that the fidelity, a basic notion of quantum information science, may be used to characterize quantum phase transitions, regardless of what type of internal order is present in quantum many-body states. The equivalence between the existence of an order parameter and the orthogonality of different ground-state wavefunctions for a system undergoing a quantum phase transition is used to justify the introduction of the notions of irrelevant and relevant information as the counterparts of fluctuations and orders in the conventional description. The irrelevant and relevant information are quantified, which allows us to identify unstable and stable fixed points (in the sense of renormalization group theory) for quantum spin chains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]