Absolutely, the "situation models" is a great idea. It might be nice to see a hierarchical tree of situations like this:
- Address
- Europe
- Germany
- France
- Netherlands
- UK
- America
- Taxonomy
The alternative is the "tag cloud" where people would add "Address, Netherlands, Model Request" to the thread. Between the two systems, I like the visual appeal of the hierarchy but the tag cloud would probably be easier to implement since there's already a Tags option for posts.
Tags may be more robust in the long term. Not everything is easily classifiable, and biometrics, for example, may pop up in more places than passports.
As for which models to post... I'm very NORMA-centric, but I see no reason to limit it to that. This is all about practical model-driven development, so if people are using VEA they should post VEA files. In a perfect world we'd have a converter running on the back end that would store the models, then spit out whatever file format people wanted. While we're dreaming, it'd be great to have that storage system generate screen shots of the models for people to browse through without having to download them. Realistically, I'd be happy just for a place to get feedback on my rusty modeling skills.
As for getting people interested in participating, the "if you build it, they will come" philosophy is kind of what I'm hoping for. From what I can tell there are no existing ORM repositories where people are sharing and collaborating on models. Of course, my research is limited by the fact that searching for "Object Role Modeling" turns up pages of academic papers, and any search for ORM is going to pull up what I call "The Dark ORM".
I don't know much about the international community other than this forum, but there are plenty of Neumont alumni who are out in the field and their colleagues say, "It's a pretty picture, but what can you do with it?" If they want to use it, they have to model nearly everything from scratch. Eventually they give up because it's easier to add a few tables, use The Dark ORM to reflect on it, and hit the next deadline.