Preface Standards development within the Information Technology sector is harmonized with international standards development. Through the CSA Technical Committee on Information Technology (TCIT), Canadians serve as the Canadian Advisory Committee (CAC) on ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 on Information Technology (ISO/IEC JTC1) for the Standards Council of Canada (SCC), the ISO member body for Canada and sponsor of the Canadian National Committee of the IEC. Also, as a member of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Canada participates in the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (ITU-T). Scope This Recommendation | International Standard defines an Application Service Element (the Common Management Information Service Element), which may be used by an application process in a centralized or decentralized management environment to exchange information and commands for the purpose of systems management, as defined by the OSI Management Framework in CCITT Rec. X.700 | ISO/IEC 7498-4. This Recommendation | International Standard is positioned in the application layer of ITU-T Rec. X.200 | ISO/IEC 7498-1 and is defined according to the model provided by ITU-T Rec. X.207 | ISO/IEC 9545. This Recommendation | International Standard defines: a set of service primitives that constitute the application service element; the parameters that are passed in each service primitive; any necessary information for the semantic description of each service primitive. This Recommendation | International Standard does not define: the nature of any implementation intended to provide the defined service; the semantics associated with the information or commands that are exchanged by means of the service; the manner in which management is accomplished by the user of the service; the nature of any interactions which result in the use of the service. No requirement is made for conformance to this Recommendation | International Standard.