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 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 th ...

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 ...

or a system. Examples of GPM languages are: * The

Unified Modeling Language The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a general-purpose, developmental modeling language in the field of software engineering that is intended to provide a standard way to visualize the design of a system. The creation of UML was originally m ...

(UML), an industry standard for modeling software-intensive systems * EXPRESS, 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,IEEE Standard for Functional Modeling Language—Syntax and Semantics for IDEF0, Software Engineering Standards Committee of the IEEE Computer Soci ...

, 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") bu ...

, 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 arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable ...

, a data modeling 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