Marshalling
The term for encoding high-level data-structures so they fit the sequence-of-bytes (or sequence-of-words) paradigm used in low-level message-passing paradigms.Marshalling is particularly problematic when running programs and/or closures (i.e. programs together with they internal data) are to be communicated. It's typically something that you needn't care about when you have orthogonal persistence and a distributed system, but that programmers spend more than 70% of their time doing because they use low-level operating systems.
This page is linked from: Communication Methods of Migration Orthogonal Persistence Portability Serializing Universal Binary Format