Towards a standard for model specification and storage

Software production has become an industrial task usually involving teams of programmers working on complex problems to produce large, even huge software systems. Globally distributed teams are doing a growing share of all software development work. The management of software engineering teamwork, especially of a temporally and/or spatially distributed team, presents an enormous organizational challenge as well as an intricate technical problem, as such distributed teamwork requires tool support for coordination of cooperative activities, maintenance of project control, and sharing of information. Domain-specific Model Integrated Program Synthesis environments are created according to a modeling paradigm - a description of the class of models that can be created using the system. Just as model integrated computing applications are executable instances of domain models, domain models can be viewed as instances of metamodels. The representation of these models and the modeling paradigm is unique to the specific modeling environment. This poses a major problem for portability of models from one modeling environment to another. The purpose of this paper is to explore the possibility of a common standard for the storage of models, in what framework the standard should exist, and who should define the standard.