Opening the Nation: Leveraging Open Data to Create New Business and Provide Services

Opening government data has been one of the main goals of nations building their e-government structures. Nonetheless, more than publishing government data for public viewing, the bigger concern right now is promoting the use change to "and proving the usefulness of available public data". In order to do this, governments must be able to, not only publicize data but more so, publish the kind of data usable to infomediaries and developers in order to create new products and services for citizens. This research investigates 30 open data use cases of South Korea as listed in Data.go.kr. This study aims to contribute to a better understanding of open datasets utilization in a technologically-advanced and well-developed nation and hopefully provide some useful insights on how open data is currently being used, how it is opening up new business, and more importantly, how it is contributing to the civic society by providing services to the public.