ASN.1 Versus Other Data Structure Definition Schemes
Since it is commonly used for defining messages for communication protocols, ASN.1, with its associated encoding rules, results in a binary encoding.
Other communication protocols, such as Internet protocols HTTP and SMTP, define messages using text tags and values, sometimes based on the Augmented Backus-Naur form (ABNF) notation. The definition also defines the encoding, which is in text.
There has been much debate over the two approaches, and both have their merits; the ASN.1 approach is believed to be more efficient, and with Packed Encoding Rules, certainly provides a more compact encoding. The textual approach is claimed to be easier to implement (through creation and parsing of text strings) and easier to debug, as one can simply read an encoded message. In the case of the Megaco protocol, consensus between the two points of view was not reached and so two encodings, one based on ASN.1 and one on ABNF, were defined.
The ASN.1 XML Encoding Rules (XER) attempts to bridge the gap by providing a textual encoding of data structures defined using ASN.1 notation. Generic String Encoding Rules were also defined for the sole purpose of presenting and inputting data to/from a user.
Read more about this topic: Abstract Syntax Notation One
Famous quotes containing the words data, structure, definition and/or schemes:
“Mental health data from the 1950’s on middle-aged women showed them to be a particularly distressed group, vulnerable to depression and feelings of uselessness. This isn’t surprising. If society tells you that your main role is to be attractive to men and you are getting crow’s feet, and to be a mother to children and yours are leaving home, no wonder you are distressed.”
—Grace Baruch (20th century)
“Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)
“Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, not to find a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“Science is a dynamic undertaking directed to lowering the degree of the empiricism involved in solving problems; or, if you prefer, science is a process of fabricating a web of interconnected concepts and conceptual schemes arising from experiments and observations and fruitful of further experiments and observations.”
—James Conant (1893–1978)