The 17 interlinked Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their related 169 targets, which are at the heart of the UN's 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, provide a new policy framework worldwide towards ending all forms of poverty, fighting inequalities and tackling climate (https://sdgs.un.org/goals). The SDGs, set in 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly and intended to be achieved by the year 2030, are part of a UN Resolution called the "2030 Agenda". The EU has committed to implement the Sustainable Development Goals both in its internal and external policies.

The UN developed a system of Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs) for Sustainable Development Goals, Targets, Indicators and related statistical series to support the development of a United Nations system-wide ecosystem of machine-readable data and documents based on Linked Open Data (LOD) principles. The taxonomy is available to IT developers and the public at large under http://metadata.un.org/sdg/?lang=en.