Ed-Fi Unifying Data Model

Introduction

The Ed-Fi Unifying Data Model (UDM) is the logical, enterprise data model behind the Ed-Fi Data Standard. It defines the entities, attributes, and relationships 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 UDM is not itself an API or a physical database schema. Ed-Fi API specifications and database implementations such as the Ed-Fi ODS/API are derived from it. See What is the purpose of the Ed-Fi Unifying Data Model? for how the UDM keeps the Ed-Fi Data Standard specifications consistent.

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 Unifying Data Model annually. Please see the Roadmap for the Ed-Fi Technology Suite 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.

• Data Standard 6.x Model Reference
• Data Standard 5.0 Model Reference
• Data Standard 4.0 Model Reference (opens in Confluence)
• Data Standard 3.3 Model Reference (opens in Confluence)
• Data Standard 3.2 Model Reference (opens in Confluence)
• Data Standard 3.1 Model Reference (opens in Confluence)