To simplify the engineering of field devices, almost every fieldbus organization has developed its own Device Description Language (DDL), a formal language to describe the services and configuration options of field devices. The DDLs are usually tailored to the needs of the associated fieldbus engineering tool chain and unusable in tool chains of other vendors or in tools for other lifecycle phases. This paper describes a generic approach to overcome these shortcomings by means of AutomationML and provides an example for IO-Link masters and devices. The proposed method is generic and re-usable for other DDLs.