Standardizing the presentation layer. why and what?

This paper deals with the implementation of architectural problems in the ISO Presentation layer, particularly with reference to the encoding/decoding aspects. First, a brief overview is made of the OSI Presentation layer, then the problem of passing from an abstract (ASN.1) description of data types to an actual representation of data associated values is tackled. Next, a possible solution is given, and an architecture is shown for an ASN.1 encoder/decoder implementation. The last section describes how to enrich such an architecture in order to implement a so-called generalized encoder/decoder.