Culture Ministry to Release Five Types of AI and High-value Public Data in the Cultural Sector for the First Time

The Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism is set to actively respond to the recent surge in demand from the artificial intelligence (AI) industry by officially launching the "AI and High-Value Public Data Opening Project for the Cultural Sector."

On September 3, the Ministry announced that, for the first time, five types of high-value public data related to AI held by four institutions—namely, the National Gugak Center, National Library of Sejong, Korea Tourism Organization, and Korea Cultural Information Service—will be made available to the public this year.

This project is part of the "AI and High-Value Public Data Top 100 Opening Project" selected by the Ministry of the Interior and Safety last year. The goal is to reprocess high-quality data in the fields overseen by the Ministry—such as culture, arts, sports, and tourism—into AI-friendly formats and release them as National Key Data through the Public Data Portal by December. By the end of next year, the Ministry plans to continuously discover and open a total of 12 types of high-value AI data (five in 2026 and seven in 2027), thereby accelerating the creation of a cultural industry ecosystem and the digital transformation.

The National Gugak Center will process and release digital audio and image data related to traditional Korean music (Gugak) for use in AI training and other applications. By providing expert information—such as genre, instrument, rhythm, and expressive techniques—along with cultural context, the center aims to enable wide usage of the data not only for research and education, but also for AI-based Gugak content creation and other fields.

The National Library of Sejong will systematically organize and release policy information collected from domestic and international government ministries, public organizations, research institutes, and international organizations. Based on policy documents open for release, the library will create QA datasets suitable for AI training and provide tailored information by major policy, social, economic issue, and national agenda item. This will support policy information search, analysis, and AI-based policy data utilization.

The Korea Tourism Organization will continue to update nationwide tourism information in both Korean and multiple foreign languages, and will expand the opening of regional and thematic tourism video content. Through this, the organization aims to increase utilization of public data in various tourism services—such as travel and tourism platforms, multilingual tourist guides, and tourism content production—and to accelerate the AI transformation of the tourism industry.

The Korea Cultural Information Service will develop and release three-dimensional cultural assets, Korean attire data, and traditional pattern data in AI-optimized formats. Through expert review, the reliability of the data regarding cultural contexts and historical facts will be improved. In addition, relationships and semantic information among cultural resources will be structured based on ontology, enabling AI to more accurately learn the meaning and context of Korean culture.

For this project, the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism will introduce a model context protocol (MCP)–based connection method for the first time. When releasing the finalized data through the Public Data Portal, MCP linkage information will also be provided. Through this approach, the Ministry plans to shift the public data utilization system from "public data people have to find and use" to "cultural data easily connected and utilized by AI." MCP refers to a common communication protocol that enables AI models to connect to and make use of external data and tools.

A Ministry policy official stated, "In the AI era, opening up AI and high-value cultural data for use in the content industry is at the core of the national content industry strategy. Moving forward, the Ministry will do its utmost to continuously expand the range of high-value public data in cultural sectors—such as integrated book information, museum artifact data, and film information—so that these resources can be actively used."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.