The Internet creates a strong demand for standardized exchange not only of data itself but especially of data semantics, as this same internet increasingly becomes the carrier of e-business activity (e.g. using web services). One way to achieve this is in the form of communicating “rich” conceptual schemas. In this paper we adopt the well-known CM technique of ORM, which has a rich complement of business rule specification, and develop ORM-ML, an XML-based markup language for ORM. Clearly domain modeling of this kind will be closely related to work on so-called ontologies and we will briefly discuss the analogies and differences, introducing methodological patterns for designing distributed business models. Since ORM schemas are typically saved as graphical files, we designed a textual representation as a marked-up document in ORM-ML so we can save these ORM schemas in a more machine exchangeable way that suits networked environments. Moreover, we can now write style sheets to convert such schemas into another syntax, e.g. pseudo natural language, a given rule engine’s language, first order logic.