Institutional Issues in Promoting Korean Spatial Data Exchange

The information system fields of spatial applications have rapidly grown during the last decade in Korea. Spatial data has been produced for a variety of systems without common standards until national GIS Committee defined the data exchange formats among spatial databases in the middle of 1990's. It aimed at promoting data sharing between the different systems in similar application fields. However, a considerable number of databases built prior to the introduction of the standards are not yet standard compliant but still play the roles of the main producers/consumers in the data collection field such as early developed huge AM/FM systems maintained by governmental organizations. The strong autonomy of these databases keeps their own data models, formats and descriptions from being standardized, which leads the sharing to a more difficult stage. Sharing is another way of data acquisition with least efforts and time away from direct collection. A data clearinghouse is the core module which directs users to the relevant data resources. The contents of datasets should be described with predefined metadata standards for precise indexing. Moreover, a number of technical problems have to be resolved for the common use of data between heterogeneous spatial database systems. However, the technical issues can be covered by the present information technologies. The difficulties persist in the political/institutional issues. Institutional issues are derived from the diverse sources such as political background, governmental policies, related laws and/or regulations. The paper will firstly make an analysis of current situation in terms of Korean policies, laws and regulations, secondly abstract the institutional issues from the situation analysis, lastly present guidelines for promoting spatial data sharing in Korea.