DICED turns scattered intergovernmental education policy texts into searchable evidence, thereby helping education policymakers trace debates, actors, and trends.
Multilateralism faces growing pressure. Nevertheless, the discussions on the Post-2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) are starting to take off, with formal discussions expected to begin in 2027, and thus on SDG4. The SDG4 aims to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. In light of this, a new open research infrastructure developed at the University of Zurich aims to make the history of intergovernmental cooperation in education searchable and structured, as well as to inform education policymakers: the Database on Intergovernmental Cooperation in Education (DICED). Led by Dr. Patrick Mondjouridès, a Senior Teaching and Research Assistant at the Chair for Education History and Education Policy Analysis under Prof. Christian Ydesen at the University of Zurich, the DICED project brings together expertise from educational science, computational linguistics, and digital humanities. The project is partly funded by swissuniversities with CHF 169’000 as part of the Swiss Open Research Data action line (CHORD) under the Programme Open Science II. The remaining CHF 227’000 are matched by the participating institutions.
The team also includes Prof. Gerold Schneider from LiRI, the linguistic research infrastructure at UZH’s department of Computational Linguistics, Christian Ydesen, and two researchers, Dr. Anastassia Shaitarova and Dr. Yingqiang Gao, who co-developed a related project with Montjouridès: SpiritRAG, a retrival-augmented AI tool that queries over 7’500 UN documents on religion, spirituality, health, and education that earned the team the UZH Postdoc Team Award in 2025. Data generated during this process is now feeding directly into DICED.
What DICED addresses is a gap in how intergovernmental education texts are stored, accessed, and analysed. Resolutions adopted by bodies like UNESCO, the Council of Europe, the UN as well as the European Council are often scattered across organisational websites, with little institutional memory of the debates that preceded them, or of the chain of intertextual relations that exist and link education decision making across intergovernmental bodies and over time. This is where DICED comes in. It encodes these documents using Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standards and UNESCO-OECD-Eurostat (UOE) Data Structure Definition (DSD). This not only makes the material more findable and accessible, but analytically rich and replicable, in accordance with the FAIR principles at the heart of open science practices: Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability.
One of the central features of the database is its potential to retrace and map argumentative structures across texts. As a demonstration, the DICED team submitted a shared task, ‘Reconstructing the Reasoning in United Nations Relations’, as a part of the Argument Mining Workshop to be held during this year’s Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), the leading conference in the field. Using around 3’000 UNESCO and UN resolutions on education, eight teams developed AI-based systems to automatically identify operative versus preambular paragraphs, tag each paragraph according to a 140+ category classification system built on the DSD mentioned above, and map intra-document argumentative relationships.
Beyond the academic output, DICED is designed with accessibility in mind, which is especially interesting for education policy makers. Alongside the TEI-structured database for computational researchers, a visual interface is in development that will allow policymakers and non-specialists to navigate the data through timelines, thematic tags, country-level views, and actor networks. “If a ministry official wants to know who has been most active on the right to education, they shouldn’t need to read thousands of documents,” Dr. Montjouridès explains. He adds: “But now I know that Portugal has been one of the most active countries on the right to education.”
The database currently covers the UN, UNESCO and the Council of Europe, and with the European Council, the OECD, the African Union, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), and other regional bodies in the pipeline. The launch is foreseen for September 2026, with funding running through the end of this year. An event bringing together academics and international organisations such as UNESCO to discuss post-2030 global education goals drawing on DICED data is planned for October 2026. And Dr. Montjouridès clearly outlines his vision for the future: “In my views, in the current international order, there’s a need to come back to this notion of intergovernmental cooperation in education. Having access to actionable memories is a central objective of DICED, so that consultations for the post-2030 agenda are not just forward looking but also as much as possible reflexive on the failures and successes of the past.”