The TDF is freely available with no restrictions and requires no use of proprietary or patented technology and is thus open for anyone to use.

[2] Each TDO consists of a data payload which can be associated with an unlimited number of metadata objects.

[2] In addition, both data and metadata objects can be associated with a block of encryption information which is used by any TDF consumer to decrypt the associated data or metadata if it had been encrypted.

[2] A TDC allows for additional metadata objects to apply to a set of TDOs.

The United States Intelligence Community maintains the IC-TDF, which includes government-specific tagging requirements on top of the core TDF capabilities mentioned above, in an XML Data Encoding Specification.