In computer science and allied fields of information management and business process modeling, modelling languages enable software architects, business analysts, and others to specify the requirements of an organizational or software system on a 'top' or architectural level. These languages seek to diagrammatically render system requirements in a manner that management, user groups, and other stakeholders can understand, with a goal of eliciting feedback from these groups. Wikibooks Wikiversity has more about this subject: School of Computer Science Open Directory Project: Computer Science Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies Belief that title science in computer science is inappropriate Categories: Computer science ... Information management is the handling of knowledge acquired by one or many disparate sources in a way that optimizes access by all who have a share in that knowledge or a right to that knowledge. ... Business Process Modeling (BPM) is an activity performed by business analysts within a company. ... Software architecture is a coherent set of abstract patterns guiding the design of each aspect of a larger software system. ... A business analyst is responsible for identifying the business needs of their clients and stakeholders to help determine solutions to business problems. ...

What distinguishes modelling languages from diagramming techniques, is in their ability to produce executable and testable software artifacts and simulations. Whereas a diagramming technique ends with a pictorial representation of user requirements, a modelling language enables the production of software artifacts from these representations. Tool support in modelling languages includes source code generators, debuggers, and means of simulating the behavior of these systems in action. Since the mid 1990's, tool support also started to include model checking and other means of software verification. Model checking is a method to algorithmically verify finite-state systems formally. ... Software verification is a broad and complex discipline of software engineering whose goal is to assure that a software fully satisfies all the expected requirements. ...

Although one secondary goal of modelling languages aims to support programming without programmers, historically software developers have become involved once the requirements specification is complete. Increased software complexity, particularly the ability to provide software support for concurrency requires knowledge of parallel computing and distributed systems. Parallel computing is the simultaneous execution of the same task (split up and specially adapted) on multiple processors in order to obtain faster results. ... This article or section should be merged with Distributed computing In computer science, a distributed system is an application that consists of components running on different computers concurrently. ...

A large number of modelling languages appear in the literature, however, the most notable languages are ones having the most extensive tool support. As of 2005 these include:

• Unified Modeling Language (UML) incorporates a wide variety of diagramming techniques and topologies. Its extensive underlying tool support enables specifications written using one technique or 'view' to be transparently converted and rendered in another view, eventually resulting in executable artifacts.

• Petri nets use variations on exactly one diagramming technique and topology, namely the bipartite graph. The simplicity of its basic user interface easily enabled extensive tool support over the years, particularly in the areas of model checking, graphically-oriented simulation, and software verification.