To represent an arbitrarily complex data structure in a location-independent way so that it can be communicated or stored elsewhere.

For example, an object representing a time, with attributes for year, month, timezone, etc., could be serialised as the string "2002-02-24T14:33:52-0800", or an XML element "", or as a binary string.

As well as providing an external data representation (e.g. representing an integer as a string of ASCII digits) and marshalling components into a single block of data, a serialisation algorithm needs to follow pointers to include objects referred to by the initial object. This is further complicated by the possible presence of cycles in the object graph.

It should be possible to store the serialised representation on disk, or transmit it across a network, and then restore it as an object (graph) that is the same as the original.