The goal of the group is to develop standard computer-based mechanisms for expressing and transferring descriptive information about biological specimens, taxa, as well as similar entities such as diseases. The exchanged data may include terminologies, ontologies, descriptions, identification tools and associated resources. The developed standards shall allow capture, transport, caching and archiving of descriptive data, using platform- and application-independent means.

Such a standard is crucial to enabling lossless porting of data between existing and future software platforms including identification, data-mining and analysis tools, and federated databases.

* The SDD Standard:
o provides a flexible, platform-independent data structure for the capture and storage of taxonomic descriptions, including original data (sample data)
o provides data structures for the support of multi-access (interactive matrix-based keys) as well as sequential (dichotomous/polytomous) identification keys (traditional keys)
o comprises a superset of data requirements of all known programs managing descriptive data
o provides extension beyond existing programs where data requirements are believed to be predictable
o is readily extensible to account for future developments and data requirements
o is human-readable (although it is assumed that in almost all cases standard descriptions will be machine-generated and processed)
o is XML-based, and provides a schema for validation of documents and the use of schema compilers such as XML-beans for the production of schema-based SDD tool generation.
* It facilitates:
o lossless porting of data between standard-aware applications
o achievable progressive markup of legacy descriptions, particularly natural-language descriptions
o comparability and combinability of alternate descriptions of any one taxon
o multlingual data sets
o efficient reusable descriptions serving multiple purposes
o archiving and sharing of raw and processed data
* It encourages:
o Structured data over unstructured
o Documenting IPR metadata, including Open access licenses
o Recording data on a specimen level rather than on a taxon level.

The core SDD group is considering defining a subset, "SDD Lite" of the current schema, with the particular goal of producing a representation in RDF of the main concerns of SDD, in furtherance of TDWG's goal to have RDF representations of its major ontologically-related standards. Hence, the SDD Interest Group especially seeks people interested, and with suitable experience in, the use of Semantic Web technologies for describing taxa.