scope:

This ITU-T Recommendation | International Standard specifies:

a) procedures for the transfer of data and control information from one presentation-entity to a peer presentation-entity;

b) the means of selecting, by means of functional units, the procedures to be used by the presentation-entities;

c) the structure and encoding of the presentation-protocol-data-units used for the transfer of data and control information.

The procedures are defined in terms of

d) the interactions between peer presentation-entities through the exchange of presentation-protocol-data-units;

e) the interactions between a presentation-entity and the presentation-service-user in the same system through the exchange of presentation-service primitives;

f) the interactions between a presentation-entity and the session-service-provider through the exchange of session-service primitives. 

These procedures are defined in the main text of this ITU-T Recommendation | International Standard supplemented by state tables in Annex A. 

These procedures are applicable to instances of communication between systems which support the Presentation Layer of the OSI Reference Model and which wish to interconnect in an OSI environment. 

This ITU-T Recommendation | International Standard also specifies conformance criteria for systems implementing these procedures. It does not contain tests which can be used to demonstrate this conformance.

¹) The implementation and use of this Recommendation | International Standard for Open Systems Interconnection requires the public assignment of values of ASN.1 type OBJECT IDENTIFIER to specifications of abstract syntaxes and transfer syntaxes. Public specification and naming of abstract syntaxes and transfer syntaxes can occur in ISO standards or ITU-T Recommendations, or under the mechanisms identified in the Registration Authority procedures. A  Registration procedures specification is given in Annex B.