It is hard to manage the software design documents within a distributed development team. The issues include the format, distribution and evolution of data. This paper mainly focuses on the issues of the format and distribution, and addresses how we can manage the software design documents for the distributed software development in the standard based way. In the software engineering community, Unified Modeling Language (UML) has been widely accepted as an object-oriented software analysis/design methodology, since it provides most of the concepts and notations that are essential for documenting object oriented models. UML, however, does not have an explicit format for interchanging its models intentionally. This paper addresses this lack and proposes UXF (UML eXchange Format), which is an exchange format for UML models, based on XML (Extensible Markup Language). It is a format powerful enough to express, publish, access and exchange UML models and a natural extension from the existin...