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Good practice Imported

Seoul Open Data Plaza — Scaling Public Data Into a High-Use Civic Utility

South Korea · Seoul · See the South Korea profile · See the Seoul profile

Evidence: Observational / pre–post Top 17% 81/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

Seoul's public-data portal grew from about 1,500 datasets and 53,000 daily uses in 2013 to roughly 4,700 datasets and 670,000 daily uses by 2017, becoming civic infrastructure that citizen developers built transit, parking and bike-storage apps on.

~1,500 → ~4,700 datasets
Datasets published (Aug 2013 to May 2017)
53,000 → 670,000 uses/day
Average daily platform uses (Aug 2013 to May 2017)
Seoul Open Data Plaza — Scaling Public Data Into a High-Use Civic Utility

Details

Maturity
Established
Promoter
Seoul Metropolitan Government
Period
2012–present
Keywords
public sector, open data, e-government, civic tech

Context

Seoul Metropolitan Government launched its Open Data Plaza (data.seoul.go.kr) in May 2012 after residents grew frustrated with having to file formal requests for public information needed to build smartphone apps on city services. The portal consolidates datasets from 14 organisations, including Seoul Metro, across sectors such as traffic, safety, environment and health.

Results

By August 2013 the platform offered about 1,500 datasets and logged a cumulative 947 million data requests at a daily average of roughly 53,000. By May 2017 the catalogue had grown to about 4,700 datasets with an average of 670,000 uses per day. Citizen developers used the released data to build applications such as smart subway trackers, parking-availability tools and bicycle-storage locators.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Medium (€50k–€500k)
Time to results
Long (> 3 years)
Staffing & skills
Seoul Metropolitan Government, Seoul Metro and 13 other partner organisations

Conditions for success

  • legal anchoring via South Korea's national Act on Promotion of the Provision and Use of Public Data (2013)
  • consolidation of scattered agency data into a single citizen-facing portal

Commonly funded by

National / regional programmes

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Data sources

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Attachments

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