We propose an interchange format for hybrid systems to allow tool interoperability and seamless exchange of information among the hybrid system research community. The need of an interchange format is clear as the tools that have been developed so far use different modeling assumptions and semantics. In our approach, we focus on the semantics of the interchange format as we believe that only using a well-defined semantics will allow developing translation mechanisms from one tool to another that have guaranteed correctness properties. A unique, precise model of computation would make it impossible to support a variety of models that can be radically different. Hence, we use an “abstract semantics” in the sense that it can be refined to yield any model of computation, or “concrete semantics”, which, in turn, is associated to the existing languages that are used to specify hybrid systems. We show how leveraging its abstract semantics, the interchange format can be used to capture the essential information across different modeling approaches and how such information can be effectively used in the translation process