Unifying Data Model - Overview

The Ed-Fi Unifying Data Model (UDM) is an enterprise data model of commonly exchanged, shared, and analyzed K–12 education data. The model includes entities such as students, teachers, assessment results, attendance, and many others. Those entities contain attributes (i.e., properties) that are also easily recognized: for example, assessment results have things like scores, the date the assessment was taken, and accommodations. Entities also have natural associations (i.e., relationships): for example, students are related to schools via their enrollments.

The Ed-Fi UDM is independent of any interchange mechanism, any database or data warehouse storage structure, or any type of application interface. It is meant to capture the meaning and inherent structure of the most important information in the K–12 education enterprise in order to facilitate information sharing of education data.

The purpose of the Ed-Fi UDM is to enable information sharing and reuse of education data. The Ed-Fi UDM provides a standard means for:

Data Description. Provides a uniform means to describe education data, its structure (syntax), and meaning (semantics), thereby supporting its discovery and sharing.
Data Context. Facilitates discovery based upon the definition of specific education data domains.
Data Sharing. Supports the access and exchange of data based upon concrete implementation of the Ed-Fi UDM or subsets of the Ed-Fi UDM that provide semantic interoperability between systems.
Data Unification or “Harmonization.” Provides the capability to compare education data artifacts across systems through a well-defined model that unifies the semantics of data artifacts into “common entities.”

As such, the Ed-Fi UDM forms the foundation for all Ed-Fi Data Standards and the products in the Ed-Fi Technical Suite.

Scope

The scope of the Ed-Fi UDM is K–12 education data relevant to schools, local education agencies, regional service education agencies, and state education agencies. The core goal of the Ed-Fi UDM is to capture "student-centric" information (that is, it is optimized to capture data directly relevant to decision-making as regards student performance), but it has grown over time into related areas of the K–12 enterprise.

The Ed-Fi UDM focuses on granular education data for specific students, teachers, schools, courses, grades, assessments, and so forth. It generally does not include aggregate data but rather includes the fine-grained source data from which aggregate data may be calculated.

Ed-Fi Domains

The scope of education data is large and its organization is complex. Domains serve to provide views of the Ed-Fi UDM to assist in its understanding and use. In many cases, a specific Ed-Fi data exchange schema may only deal with data in a single domain, such as assessment or enrollment. In other cases, it may span several domains, such as with a student transfer record.

The Ed-Fi UDM is organized into 16 base domains:

Alternative/Supplemental Services
Assessment
Bell Schedule
Discipline
Education Organization
Enrollment
Finance
Graduation
Intervention
School Calendar
Staff
Student Academic Record
Student Attendance
Student Cohort
Student Identification and Demographics
Teaching and Learning

These domains are generally well-recognized in the K–12 education data space.

Ed-Fi Unifying Data Model Notation

The Ed-Fi UDM is expressed as Unified Modeling Language (UML) Class diagrams. UML Class diagrams capture the logical structure of a domain (in this case the education domain) as a set of entities, attributes, and associations between entities.