The Object Exchange Model (OEM) serves as the basic data model in numerous projects of the Stanford University Database Group, including Tsimmis, Lore, and C3. This document first defines and explains the model, and then it describes a syntax for textually encoding OEM. By adopting this syntax as a standard across all of our OEM projects, we hope to encourage interoperability and also to provide a consistent view of OEM to interested parties outside Stanford.