Ed-Fi Unifying Data Model
- Stephen Fuqua
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 core purpose of the model is to capture and represent data related to student performance. Over time, the model has been expanded to adjacent domains critical to K–12 education, but indirectly related to student performance (e.g., staff assignments and credentials; finance data; etc.).
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 Ed-Fi Unifying Data Model.
For more information on the Ed-Fi UDM, please see the following version-specific pages:
Ed-Fi Unifying Data Model (version 5)
Ed-Fi Unifying Data Model (version 4)
Ed-Fi Unifying Data Model (version 3.3)