The Arduino Service Interface Protocol (ASIP) is a protocol that provides communication between a computer and a microcontroller, typically Arduino.
ASIP enables a computer to discover, configure, read and write the microcontroller's general purpose IO pins. In this sense it is similar in spirit to Firmata, but differs in that it is designed to easily expose higher level service that can be implemented on Arduino.
The standard ASIP implementation uses a serial connection to the remote computer but other links using a stream interface, such as Ethernet can be used.