About Primmel

Prime MMEL — the torch carried forward.

The Name & Logo

The Name

Primmel is Prime MMEL: the second-generation MMEL, the original of its kind. The word borrows from the Latin primus (first) and the Greek protos (first, original) — both ultimately from a root meaning foremost. Primmel is the foremost modelling language for executable standards.

It also reads as a torch-bearer: the first to carry the MMEL flame into the next generation, lighting the way for the standards organizations, certifiers, and regulators who follow.

The Logo

The Primmel logo is a custom-drawn mark — a stylised monogram with tonal shading, rendered as a single piece of vector art.

A Single Mark

The logo is one composition, not an assembly of separate glyphs. Its stem, bowl, and shading are all part of the same drawing. This mirrors Primmel’s promise: one model, one source of truth, no seams between document and code.

Tonal Shading

The mark is built from hundreds of tonal paths, giving it a sculpted, light-cast quality. This is a deliberate contrast with the flat, geometric icons typical of developer-tooling brands. Primmel is for standards work — serious, crafted, lasting.

Indigo — the Brand Colour

The logo is rendered in Primmel’s signature indigo. On light backgrounds, dark tonal values map to deep indigo (#1e3a8a) and lift toward white. On dark backgrounds, the same values are inverted and tinted toward sky (#93c5fd), so the mark stays luminous against dark surfaces.

Light & Dark Mode Logos

The same mark is rendered two ways: deep indigo on light backgrounds, sky indigo on dark. Both variants are generated from the same source artefact by tonal mapping, so the mark’s character is preserved across themes:

Light Mode

Dark Mode

The Colors

The Primmel palette is built around indigo, the brand colour that ties the mark, the chrome, and the documentation together:

Indigo — #1e3a8aThe light-mode mark. Deep, formal, contemplative — the colour of a standard taken seriously.

Sky Indigo — #93c5fdThe dark-mode mark. Lifts the tonal values so the mark stays luminous against dark surfaces.

Slate — #0f172aThe dark-mode background anchor. The darkest tonal values in the mark resolve to slate on dark themes so they fade into the surface.

Paper — #ffffffThe light-mode background. The lightest tonal values in the mark resolve to white on light themes.

Origin Story

Primmel is the successor to MMEL (Multi-Modal Modelling Language), originally developed jointly by Ribose and the British Standards Institution (BSI) for the BSI SMART program. MMEL was used to give SMART standards a single, executable, machine-readable form: process flows, data requirements, evidential requirements, and the mappings between them — all defined in one place and consumable by tools.

MMEL went on to become the basis of OIML SMART, the international metrology certification system under the International Organization of Legal Metrology. OIML SMART publishes international recommendations that apply to legal metrology certification — the publication and dissemination of requirements, conformance tests, and test report forms — from test laboratories to evaluation agencies, manufacturers, and users of devices.

Primmel carries that work into its second generation: the same discipline, the same rigor, and the same ambition to make standards instantly available — now made public so any standards organization can model its work in an executable form.

Mission Statement

Primmel’s mission is to make standards executable, mappable, and auditable as a single source of truth — not as separate documents, spreadsheets, and PDFs that drift apart the moment they’re published.

We believe a standard should be:

Instantly available — not behind a paywall, not in a 600-page PDF that no one reads end-to-end, but in a form that machines and humans can both consume.
Executable — its process flows, data requirements, and evidential requirements defined precisely enough that a computer can check, run, and reason about them.
Extensible — each adopting organization can map its own processes and controls onto the standard without forking the source.
Auditable — an auditor should be able to locate compliance evidence by following the model, not by digging through folders.

The Power of the Implementation Model

The real power of Primmel is the implementation model: an organization’s own working model that maps its processes and requirements onto the elements of any Primmel-modelled standard.

A standards publisher publishes the reference model. Each organization that adopts the standard publishes its implementation model — the same primitives, but specialized to their context, with their own data, their own actors, their own evidence.

An auditor, a procurement officer, a regulator, or an integrator can then navigate from the reference standard down into any implementation model and see, structurally, where compliance is asserted, where evidence is attached, and where gaps remain.

This is what single source of truth, extensible looks like in practice.

Use Cases

Standards Publishers

Publish standards in a form readers can navigate, integrate, and test against — not only read.

Conformity Assessors

Audit by following the model. Locate evidential requirements and trace them to evidence in any adopting organization.

Regulators

Model regulatory frameworks once, then map to every licensee, every certificate, every reporting cycle.

Industry Consortia

Maintain a common baseline across members, with each member’s implementation as a specialization.

Tooling Vendors

Consume Primmel models as input: editors, validators, dashboards, test harnesses, evidence collectors.

Integrators

Bind Primmel models to real systems: data registries, process engines, compliance trackers.

Primitives at a Glance

Primmel combines what existing modelling languages leave scattered:

Data primitives — classes, enums, references, with cardinality (a la UML).
Process primitives — start events, end events, gateways, processes, canvases (a la BPMN).
Compliance primitives — provisions with RFC 2119 modality (SHALL, SHOULD, MAY, CAN, MUST).
Measurement primitives — numeric, datalist, derived values for quantitative monitoring.
Mapping primitives — links and alignments between models (.prm files).
Evidential primitives — hooks for attaching evidence to any requirement, traceable by auditors.

Standards & Adoption

Primmel is built on the legacy of MMEL, which has been adopted for:

OIML SMART — international legal metrology certification (publication, conformance tests, test report forms).
BSI SMART — the British Standards Institution’s SMART program for executable standards.
QMS, ISMS, MDSAP, ISO 13485, ISO 14971, ISO 27001 — quality, information security, and medical-device management systems modelled in the legacy MMEL.
BS 20400, BS 44003, BS 16341 — British Standards modelled as reference Primmel/MMEL artifacts.

Open Source

Primmel is an open project. Its specifications, examples, and tools are available to the public:

Specifications: published openly under permissive terms.
Examples: real models from the MMEL legacy, kept as reference and learning material.
Tools: editors, validators, and runtime support — all community-driven.
Contributing: standards organizations, tool authors, and adopters are invited to participate.

Get Started

Ready to model a standard in Primmel? Here’s the path:

Read the introduction — start with Introduction.
See a first model — work through A First Model.
Browse the examples — real MMEL models converted to Primmel, in Examples.
Read the full specification — at primmel.org/spec.
Try a model — load a model in your editor of choice and explore its primitives, processes, and provisions.

An open source project maintained by Ribose in collaboration with the standards community.