Discover
A Consumer reads the Provider’s /.well-known/sdi-configuration to learn every endpoint, grant, scope,
and capability.
SDI — Student Data Interoperability
SDI (Student Data Interoperability) is an open, vendor-neutral standard for moving an admitted applicant from an admissions system into a school management system (SMS) as a student record — over a small, predictable, RESTful HTTP interface secured with OAuth 2.0.
Instead of staff re-keying every admitted applicant by hand, an admissions system (the Consumer) discovers an SMS (the Provider) from a single base URL, an administrator authorizes the connection once, and records flow automatically. Documents transfer by reference, the interface versions cleanly, and it extends to new capabilities over time.
It is free to implement and stewarded by Admissio.
Read the StandardThe full normative specification — discovery, OAuth 2.0, the enrollment-sync capability, documents, versioning, and conformance.
Provider Implementation GuideA practical, example-driven walkthrough for building SDI support into an SMS, with copy-pasteable code.
Open the PlaygroundA live reference Provider plus a conformance harness — point it at your own base URL and watch the run (discover → authorize → schema → map → push → documents) pass or fail, with the live request and response for each step.
How a connection works
Section titled “How a connection works”Authorize
An administrator authorizes the connection once via OAuth 2.0 — ideally without ever handling an API key.
Map
The Provider declares the fields it expects as JSON Schema; the Consumer maps its source data onto them.
Sync
The Consumer pushes records; the Provider creates or updates student records and pulls any referenced documents by reference.