The invention discloses a general substation automation five-prevention system data description method, which is characterized in that the method comprises the following steps that: 1) constant types needed by a five-prevention rule and actual data of the five-prevention rule are described by XML language and are stored in an XML text; 2) a data model of a general five-prevention rule is defined and comprises various data types, hierarchical structures and various attribute fields; 3) a five-prevention rule template is mapped to a five-prevention rule example; and 4) the general five-prevention rule template based on the XML language is applied to a substation automation system. The general five-prevention system data description method based on the XML language has stronger data description capability and generality, solves the compatibility problem among five-prevention systems of various factories, effectively reduces the workload of the editing of the five-prevention rules in the five-prevention systems, and improves the accuracy.