Success: One of South Korea’s most popular information centre
MOLEG operates the Korea Law Service Centre which is one of the most popular and biggest data centres in the country. The Centre aims to allow government departments, businesses and citizens to quickly and easily search, understand and use the diverse legal information available.
Rhee considers the data centre as one of the Ministry’s most outstanding achievement. “Established in the early 1990s, the centre’s hardware is managed centrally by the Ministry of Security and Public Administration, while MOLEG is responsible for procuring and managing information, as well as developing programmes,” he says.
“Within a short time of 20 years, we have developed it as one of the most popular and biggest data centre in Korea, with over 300,000 users accessing information from the Centre every day.”
Challenges: Managing diverse sources of data
The Centre gathers all kinds of information related to legislation, current laws and their histories, constitution, laws passed in the national assembly, treaties, presidential decrees, decrees produced by each ministry, and other rules including local governments’ ordinances and regulations.
With a vision to make the Centre into an integrated information centre, Rhee’s team is challenged to ensure that the data is accurate and up to date.
“Citizens, businesses and government officers, even judges, use digitised data provided by the Centre for policy and decision making. The consequences of relying on wrong or outdated information are grave and can result in lawsuits against MOLEG,” Rhee explains.
Most of the errors occur during the manual procurement and gathering of data. Moreover, the collection process can sometimes be delayed because the data sharing process across agencies is not perfect.
“We have to collaborate with the National Assembly, the Court and over 200 local government departments in the country. Each organisation produces huge volumes of information that is very valuable to the people and the government,” he comments. “However, data sharing can be challenging because different systems do not interoperate and at times agencies are reluctant to share data.”
Automating the data cleansing and update process
MOLEG has developed a programme that will update newly enacted laws automatically. “Updates that used to take several months of manual work can now be done in seconds. New laws are updated in real-time,” says Rhee.
The team is now working on developing a programme that can search, track and recognise wrong or doubtful information.
Enhancing citizen engagement
MOLEG has created a mobile app so that citizens can access the Centre on the go. Besides making legal information open and easily searchable by citizens, MOLEG wants to involve the public in the law-making process. “We created a space for citizens to air their opinion about existing laws so that the feedback can be channelled to the right agencies concerned,” Rhee adds.
The South Korean society is becoming increasingly multi-cultural as the number of foreign residents grows. “We have employed several experts to translate the information we now have into the major languages. Looking ahead, we are exploring the use of translation programmes because we do not have enough resources as demand for more languages increases,” he says.
MOLEG is also examining the use of Big Data to gain insights on how users are searching for information.
“Open data is an important part of our e-government strategy. Citizens demand open data for transparency and I think that this is the way to go. It is now a priority that is driven across the whole of government,” concludes Rhee.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Kelly Ng
Quelle/Source: futuregov, 30.04.2014
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