Ed-Fi Unifying Data Model

The Ed-Fi Data Standard is built upon a Unifying Data Model, 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 the model still maintains that core goal. 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). There are some domains with very minimal coverage, generally because other industry standards exist to cover data exchange in those areas. In these cases, the model generally only captures enough 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.

Audience

This information is intended for organizations using the Ed-Fi Data Standard. The document is written for data modelers, but should be useful to business analysts, system developers, and local education agency, regional education service agency, and state education agency personnel involved in collecting and using education data.

Prerequisites

To gain the most benefit from this information, the reader should already be familiar with the following knowledge areas:

• Data Modeling, see here
• Unified Modeling Language (UML) as applied to conceptual Data Modeling, see here

Purpose

The purpose of this documentation is to provide an overview of the organization and high-level design of the Ed-Fi Unifying Data Model.