At the current state, head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) are stored in a multitude of different formats.This holds also for other spatially oriented acoustic data, for instance impulse responses captured by spherical microphone arrays or directivity patterns of loudspeakers/microphones. This makes the exchange and archiving of such data a tedious task.
The Spatially Oriented Format for Acoustics (SOFA) aims at overcoming this problems by defining a common format and providing an API for reading and storing the data in different languages. The format is currently in an early stage but developing at fast pace. Thats definetly an activity that you should consider to support by helping in the definition and implementation or by using just it for your applications.
