allings. SNMP, SNMPv2, SNMPv3, and RMON 1 and 2. 3rd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Addison-Wesley, 1999. 3. Allan Leinwand and Karen Fang. Network Management: A Practical Perspective. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Addison-Wesley, 1995. 4. Douglas Mauro and Kevin Schmidt. Essential SNMP. 2nd ed. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media, Inc, 2005. 5. Sidnie M. Feit. SNMP: A Guide to Network Management. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993. 6. Sean J. Harnedy. Total SNMP: Exploring the Simple Network Management Protocol. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall PTR, 1997. 7. Paul Simonau. SNMP Network Management (McGraw-Hill Computer Communications Series). New York: McGraw-Hill, 1999. Chapter 15 Information Handling This chapter is about management information handling. The concepts that are discussed include the abstract syntax for application entity using ASN.1 (Abstract Syntax Notation One), the transfer syntax for presentation entity using BER (Basic Encoding Rules), and the management information model using SMI (Structure of Management Information). 15.1 Introduction Information handling consists of two components. One is storing transfer of data and the other part is storing the data. When two systems exchange data, the syntax and semantics of the message containing the data needs to be agreed upon by the systems for effective communication. The way the data is arranged should be defined in an abstract form to understand the meaning of each data component in the predefined arrangement. This abstract form defined for application interaction is called abstract syntax and it is an application entity. ASN.1 is one specific example of abstract syntax. The set of rules for transforming or encoding the data from a local syntax to what is defined by abstract syntax is called the transfer syntax. It deals with the transfer of data from presentation to application and hence it is a presentation entity. BER is one specific example of transfer syntax. Managed object for which management data is collected needs to have a struc- tured