know the type of product that it is communicating with, usually by model number, so that it can determine whether or not the man- aged object being requested is available on the device and what type of information the managed object contains, whether it is information on current faults, past faults, activity, available capacity or some other information. This information is held by the NMS in databases for use in actions that are involved in managing the device. The NMS may present a map to the network management application with icons representing the managed objects. Alternatively, the managed objects and their val- ues may simply be provided in text format. When the user clicks on an icon they are prompted to define the managed object being requested. Associated with the icon are the Internet Protocol (IP) address and product type of the device. When the user requests information from a product, the NMS examines a definition of all managed objects that can be retrieved using the specified product type. The user is then given those managed objects and prompted to define each in turn. 4.3 Management Information Base The MIB of a device is a definition of the format of the database of managed objects within the device. The MIB is a list of managed objects together with a description of the kind of information associated with each managed object. MIBs for some products or functions are sometimes predefined in accordance with standards resulting from work by consortia of vendors that are published to the telecom com- munity. Such work is supervised by the IETF, which release MIB definitions as requests for comment (RFCs) to the Internet engineering community. MIB definitions are written using Abstract Syntax Notation 1 (ASN.1), which is a standard program definition syntax, so that the definitions are standardised. It is important that definitions are standardised to avoid ambiguity and so that MIB implementations in telecom products are compatible with SNMP managers which make requests for data from MIBs in the da