The Phylogenetics Standards Interest Group aims to develop, consolidate, inform, promote, and adopt effective standards that foster the broad availability and repurposing of phylogenetic data and their metadata. To achieve this, and to make sure that the standards meet actual needs, the group emphasizes a community-driven process and grass-roots participation. By doing so, the Interest Group yields a platform that helps in broadly promulgating standards and in furthering adoption among stakeholders.

This group interacts with other interest groups, within and outside of TDWG, to facilitate re-use of already existing efforts and standards, and allows harnessing the expertise and experience within the TDWG organization in developing standards and communicating those to the public.

The standardization efforts of the group include phylogenetic data exchange formats, metadata vocabularies and ontologies defining semantics in a computable manner, documentation of provenance, and programmable access to online phylogenetic data resources. The group also identifies and recommends data or metadata areas in need of service providers or portals, and suggests relationships between providers.

Finally, the group plans to suggest incentives and mechanisms for increasing the rate and consistency of data deposition in repositories, including a minimum reporting standard that maximizes the chance of repurposing.