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. Since 2026-09 it also powers the same-category "you might also like" widget on place detail pages, fetched per request there (realtime) — a different signal from the distance-based nearby list below.
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.
courseList (Durunubi)Official Korea Round-Way Trail walking courses — name, distance, time, difficulty, region, start/end access text, GPX route link.
Live since 2026-09-19 — usage application approved the same day; 140 official courses returned on the first production call.
storyLocationBasedList (Odii audio guide)Korea Tourism Organization's official narrated audio guide (audio file, script and photo) for attractions near the place, in Korean, English, Japanese and Chinese.
Live since 2026-09-19. Shown on a place page only when Odii has a story within the search radius; otherwise the section is hidden.
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.
Native-language data for Japanese, Chinese and Spanish readers
Since 2026-09-19 the Japanese, Simplified-Chinese and Spanish locales read place details from Korea Tourism Organization's dedicated Japanese/Chinese/Spanish tourism data services (usage applications approved 2026-09-19). English remains the fallback only for a place that has no record in the native-language service.
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.