General-purpose modelling (GPM) is the systematic use of a general-purpose modelling language to represent the various facets of an object or a system. Examples of GPM languages are:

• The Unified Modelling Language (UML), an industry standard for modelling software-intensive systems
• EXPRESS (ISO 10303-11), an international standard for the specification of data models
• IDEF, a group of languages from the 1970s that aimed to be neutral, generic and reusable
• Gellish, an industry standard natural language oriented modeling language for storage and exchange of data and knowledge, published in 2005
• Lisp, a functional programming language designed for symbol processing, later extended with imperative abilities
• XML, a data modelling language now beginning to be used to model code (MetaL, Microsoft .Net[1]