SIF AssociationCCSSO

News & Updates

"The NEDM project has been very helpful in the ongoing expansion of the eScholar Complete Data Warehouse. By leveraging the work of the NEDM in finding commonality among education data attributes across disparate systems and organizations, we are able to more quickly deliver broadly applicable enhancements."
-Shawn Bay
 Founder/CEO, eScholar LLC

“What I’ve found helpful about working with NEDM is that it provides us with a starting point for our work to expand our data system. In New Jersey, we have multiple, fragmented data collections that grew over the years as independent entities. Our challenge is to build out our SLDS to incorporate what we’ve been collecting but also focus on what we may not have been collecting. NEDM is a fabulous tool to help us establish our priorities for which data elements and collections should be incorporated first and also to provide the more global guidance of what the data values and formats should be for each new data element.”
-Bari Anhalt Erlichson PhD
 Director Office of Research and Evaluation, New Jersey Department of Education

Overview of the Data Model Content

Core Concepts

The links below provide information on key concepts and terms in the Data Model.


Data Model Top-Level Classes

In the Data Model Browser, the Data Model content is arranged in a tree-type structure. There are ten top-level classes (or branches) of the tree. On the Data Model Browser screen, the list on the left of the allows the user to “drill down” into the subclasses that are below each top-level class.

Association Functional associations among individuals, organizations, events, and programs.
Education Leadership Artifact Artifacts are related to the leadership of teaching and learning processes.
Event The Event entities represent any event within the education organization.
Information Exchange The Information Exchange entities represent information being communicated.
Instruction Artifact These entities represent any piece of information related to a student’s learning or the general learning process.
Operations Artifact These entities relate to the administrative or operational side of the organization.
Organization These entities represent the grouping of resources and people in order to reach a particular goal.
Person Individuals within the education setting.
Place These entities represent the locality or area within the education environment.
Program A plan of activities and procedures to accomplish a set of objectives.
x_Extensions This class is not a regular part of the Data Model. It is a category that contains extensions to the Data Model. For example, the category could hold Education Data Exchange Network (EDEN) input file definitions or fact table definitions for a data warehouse. This category allows concepts that are not allowed in the Data Model, such as aggregate statistics or report definitions, to be linked to entities and relationships in the Data Model.