Object‐Role Modeling (ORM) is a model‐driven engineering approach that starts with typical examples of required information or queries presented in any external formulation familiar to users, and then verbalizes these examples at the conceptual level, in terms of simple facts expressed in a controlled natural language. This language is a restricted version of natural language that is unambiguous, so the semantics are readily grasped by humans; it is also formal, so it can be used to automatically map the structures to lower levels for implementation (Halpin, 2015).

FCO-IM is similar in notation and approach to ORM. The numbers in that figure are references to verbalizations of facts. For example, 2 might refer to several verbalizations including “Student 1234 has first name Bill.”