General-purpose modeling (GPM) is the systematic use of a general-purpose

modeling language A modeling language is any artificial language that can be used to express data, information or knowledge or systems in a structure that is defined by a consistent set of rules. The rules are used for interpretation of the meaning of components in ...

to represent the various facets of an

object Object may refer to: General meanings * Object (philosophy), a thing, being, or concept ** Object (abstract), an object which does not exist at any particular time or place ** Physical object, an identifiable collection of matter * Goal, an a ...

or a

system A system is a group of interacting or interrelated elements that act according to a set of rules to form a unified whole. A system, surrounded and influenced by its open system (systems theory), environment, is described by its boundaries, str ...

. Examples of GPM languages are: * The

Unified Modeling Language The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a general-purpose visual modeling language that is intended to provide a standard way to visualize the design of a system. UML provides a standard notation for many types of diagrams which can be roughly ...

(UML), an industry standard for modeling software-intensive systems *

EXPRESS Express, The Expresss or EXPRESS may refer to: Arts, entertainment and media Film * ''Express: Aisle to Glory'', a 1998 comedy short film featuring Kal Penn * ''The Express: The Ernie Davis Story'', a 2008 film starring Dennis Quaid * The Expre ...

, a data modeling language for product data, standardized as ISO 10303-11 *

IDEF IDEF, initially an abbreviation of ICAM Definition and renamed in 1999 as Integration Definition, is a family of modeling languages in the field of systems and software engineering. They cover a wide range of uses from functional modeling to da ...

, a group of languages from the 1970s that aimed to be neutral, generic and reusable *

Gellish Gellish is an ontology language for data storage and communication, designed and developed by Andries van Renssen since mid-1990s. It started out as an engineering modeling language ("Generic Engineering Language", giving it the name, "Gellish") b ...

, an industry standard natural language oriented modeling language for storage and exchange of data and knowledge, published in 2005 *

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...

, a

data modeling Data modeling in software engineering is the process of creating a data model for an information system by applying certain formal techniques. It may be applied as part of broader Model-driven engineering (MDE) concept. Overview Data modeli ...

language now beginning to be used to model code (MetaL, Microsoft .Ne

GPM languages are in contrast with domain-specific modeling languages (DSMs).

See also