The flavour problem and family symmetry

We show how two different family symmetries can be used to address the flavour problem in SO(10)-like models. The first is based on a gauged U(1)(F), whose problems dissappear in the context of a type I string model embedding. The second is based on SU(3)(F), the maximal family group consistent with SO(10); in this case the family symmetry is more constaining, so we merely look at it in the context of a supersymmetric field theory.