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Ed-Fi Unifying Data Model

Introduction​

The Ed-Fi Data Standards are built upon a Unifying Data Model (UDM), an enterprise data model of commonly exchanged and shared K–12 education data. The model includes entities such as students, teachers, assessment results, attendance, and many others that will be easily recognized by professionals in the education field.

The model was originally developed to capture and represent data related to student performance, and that remains the core goal of the model. In addition, the model has been expanded to some domains critical to K-12 education, but indirectly related to student performance (e.g., staff assignments and credentials).

The Unifying Data Model contains some domains with minimal coverage, generally because other industry standards exist to cover data exchange in those areas. In these cases, the model typically captures enough information to assist with interpretation of data entities covered in the model, but not enough to drive system interoperability. Curricular content is an example of a domain minimally covered in the Unifying Data Model.

Revisions​

The Ed-Fi Alliance manages and revises the Unify Data Model annually. Please see the Ed-Fi Technology Roadmap for announcements about upcoming releases. Each revision is given a version number that follows the SemVer labeling conventions: major.minor.patch number (ex: 1.2.3), where a change in the major number denotes that there are breaking changes, the minor number denotes non-breaking additions, and the patch number is used to represent bug fixes (in this case, "bug fixes" may be documentation-only updates).

Please see Ed-Fi Technology Suite Supported Versions for the version history of the Data Standard, which encompasses the Data Model.