Article by Si Ying Thian: “In South Korea, open government data is powering artificial intelligence (AI) innovations in the private sector.
Take the case of TTCare which may be the world’s first mobile application to analyse eye and skin disease symptoms in pets.
The AI model was trained on about one million pieces of data – half of the data coming from the government-led AI Hub and the rest collected by the firm itself, according to the Korean newspaper Donga.
AI Hub is an integrated platform set up by the government to support the country’s AI infrastructure.
TTCare’s CEO Heo underlined the importance of government-led AI training data in improving the model’s ability to diagnose symptoms. The firm’s training data is currently accessible through AI Hub, and any Korean citizen can download or use it.
Pushing the boundaries of open data
Over the years, South Korea has consistently come up top in the world’s rankings for Open, Useful, and Re-usable data (OURdata) Index.
The government has been pushing the boundaries of what it can do with open data – beyond just making data usable by providing APIs. Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs, make it easier for users to tap on open government data to power their apps and services.
There is now rising interest from public sector agencies to tap on such data to train AI models, said South Korea’s National Information Society Agency (NIA)’s Principal Manager, Dongyub Baek, although this is still at an early stage.
Baek sits in NIA’s open data department, which handles policies, infrastructure such as the National Open Data Portal, as well as impact assessments of the government initiatives…(More)”