These 'Categories for the description of works of art' (CDWA) were created by the Art Information Task Force (AITF), a group of art historians, museum curators and registrars, visual resource professionals, art librarians, information managers and technical specialists brought together in the early 1990s by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the College Art Association. The aim of the guidelines is to develop a "conceptual framework for describing and accessing information about objects and images" by identifying practices and vocabularies for use in describing works of art, architecture, objects and visual or textual surrogates. The CDWA website provides the full-text of the guidelines, including definitions of each category, cataloguing examples and a bibliography.

This edition revised 23 October 2017.