This document defines a general-purpose OSI Object Management Application Program Interface (API) for use in conjunction with, but otherwise independent of, other application-speciÞc APIs for Open Systems Interconnection (OSI). Object Management (OM) is the creation, examination, modification, and deletion of potentially complex information objects. It presents to programmers a uniform model, or architecture, of information based upon the concept of groups, or classes, of similar information objects. The OM API provides facilities to manipulate both small objects and those too large to be held in main memory. The information objects to which OM applies are those that arise in OSI, i.e., those that correspond to the types defined by, or by means of, Abstract Syntax Notation One (ASN. 1). The OM API comprises tools for manipulating ASN.1 objects. It shields the programmer from much of the complexity of ASN.1, e.g., its Basic Encoding Rules (BER). This API is designed to work with groups of ASN.1 objects that are called packages. These packages are defined by the application-speciÞc APIs that use this API. The packages contain all the ASN.1 objects necessary to accomplish a specific task. Thus, the API does not work with any arbitrary ASN.1 objects, only those deÞned in packages. The OM API is designed to be implemented by one or more manufacturers working independently. As illustrated in Figure 3-1 below, each manufacturer effectively provides the programmer with the ability to manipulate information objects of particular kinds. This division of implementation responsibility is achieved by means of workspaces (see 4.8). Throughout this document, the term interface denotes the OM API, the term service denotes software that supplies (i.e., implements) the interface, and the term client denotes software that uses the interface. The term service interface denotes the interface realized by the service as a whole, and it is thus a synonym for interface.