The Ed-Fi Data Standards are 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 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.

Audience

This documentation is intended for organizations using Ed-Fi Data Standards or other products in the Ed-Fi Technical Suite. The documentation 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.

Ed-Fi Unifying Data Model Handbook - v3.3
Ed-Fi Unifying Data Model UML Diagrams (Visio format, on GitHub)

Browser not supported