This document specifies:
- rules and guidelines for defining extensible biometric data interchange formats that are extensible without invalidating previous data structures,
- the meaning of common data elements for use in extensible biometric data interchange formats,
- common data structures for tagged binary data formats based on an extensible specification in ASN.1,
- common data structures for textual data formats based on an XML schema definition, and
- conformance testing concepts and methodologies for testing the syntactic conformance of biometric data blocks.