Live open data — full transparency
What data powers KORLENS, and how live it is
KORLENS runs on Korea's public tourism open data — the national TourAPI 4.0 service — called live from the server on every request, never from a frozen snapshot or a hand-edited file. This page maps, operation by operation, exactly which feature calls which open-data endpoint and how fresh each one is. The same honesty policy that runs through the rest of the site applies here: no invented numbers, no fake ratings.
6
TourAPI operations live
17
Provinces covered
23
Gyeongbuk districts, each live
0
Fabricated data points
Korea TourAPI 4.0 — operation by operation
Every binding below is a real call in the running app. The server holds the API key — it never reaches the browser — and every fetch fails soft: if the feed is briefly unavailable, the section hides or shows a graceful fallback instead of erroring.
searchFestival2Festivals and events starting from today, by region and down to city/county.
Date-anchored to today (KST). Empty result falls back to the region festival list, never a 500.
areaBasedList2Attractions, culture spots and festivals for a region, optionally filtered to a single city/county.
Gyeongbuk pages pass areaCode 35 + sigunguCode for administrative-district depth.
locationBasedList2Nearby attractions within a radius of a place's coordinates, ordered by distance.
arrange=S guarantees a representative image; section hides itself if the feed returns nothing.
detailWithTour2 (barrier-free)Accessibility facilities — wheelchair access, elevators, accessible restrooms, stroller/baby amenities.
Surfaced as plain-language access tags. Most English Korea guides skip this entirely.
searchKeyword2 / detailImage2Keyword place search and per-place image galleries.
Live weather & air-quality open data
The Reality Check blends tourism data with two more public feeds, pulled live at the moment you ask, so comfort scoring reflects today's conditions — not a seasonal average.
Weather — KMA ultra-short-term observationLive temperature and conditions for the selected destination.
Public meteorological open data, fetched at request time.
Air quality — national real-time averageProvince-level real-time air-quality reading for comfort scoring.
Public air-quality open data, fetched at request time.
How we treat the data
- ·Live, not baked. Tourism data is fetched server-side per request or revalidated hourly — there is no pre-frozen dataset shipped with the build.
- ·No fabrication. We never invent ratings, review counts or visitor numbers. Where we add judgement — crowd risk, "is it worth it" — it is labelled as an honest estimate, not a fact.
- ·AI is transparent. Itinerary and chat outputs are generated by a language model on top of this open data and clearly disclosed; we tell travellers to verify hours and prices with the venue.
- ·Accessibility first-class. We deliberately surface the barrier-free open data most English guides ignore — wheelchair access, elevators, accessible restrooms.
Where this is going
What is live today and what is planned next — kept honest, marked clearly.
Province-deep regional coverage
Gyeongbuk (Gyeongsangbuk-do) has a dedicated live page for every city and county, each filtering TourAPI open data to that exact district.
Honest reality-check layer
Crowd, cost and comfort scoring blends live festival, weather and air-quality data with season heuristics — and says plainly when a place is overrated.
Operating-account migration & call-log verification
Moving from the development key to an approved operating account so every call is attributable and auditable, and adopting the legal-dong region codes that supersede the legacy area codes.
Replicate the province template nationwide
The Gyeongbuk city-and-county model is a template: each of the 17 provinces can get the same district-depth live pages, prioritising regions outside Seoul.