Interior ministry launches cross-agency data pipeline to break silos

The interior ministry said it will begin trial operations of a government-wide data pipeline on Sept. 18 to connect scattered information held by central ministries, local governments and public institutions.

The initiative aims to dismantle data silos that have long forced officials to navigate separate systems to find, request and share information, addressing field complaints that data existed but was difficult to link.

Under the new structure, data produced by individual agencies will flow through an inter-agency sharing system before converging on a national shared data platform, allowing users to conduct integrated searches and immediately utilize resources from across the government in one location.

Officials cited the early identification of vulnerable households as a primary use case, noting that combining energy voucher recipient details with monthly usage records, power cutoff status and housing complex data could reveal at-risk families that single-department metrics might miss. The ministry plans to link these combined datasets with analytical tools, enabling requesting agencies to perform autonomous analysis tailored to field conditions for more precise scientific administration.

Following the trial period, the government intends to incorporate user feedback to refine functions and expand source data connections, ultimately linking the pipeline with the public data portal, internal ministry information systems and private AI platforms to realize an AI government where data flows without interruption.

Hwang Gyu-cheol, head of the AI Government Office at the ministry, said the trial serves as a foundation for tightly connecting dispersed government data to promote its use by civil servants in the AI era.

"We will lay the groundwork for an 'AI democratic government' where artificial intelligence becomes a smart assistant throughout administrative processes," Hwang said.