South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT will improve its main website to make it AI-friendly. It aims to raise access to government policy information and make the website easier to use.

The ministry said on June 1 it will run a project tender through June 10 to improve the main website into an AI-friendly format. After selecting a contractor, an AI-friendly web structure is expected to be applied by around October at the latest.

It will also improve and overhaul overall usability for the public. A large share of materials currently posted on the website are not optimized for AI learning and search. As many materials consist of Hangul files (hwp, hwpx) and image files, the ministry will apply optimized web structures and technologies, including structured data such as schema markup, so AI can quickly and easily understand them.

It will also place descriptive information for each webpage, known as meta descriptions, so the ministry's website materials can be referenced first and accurately summarised and used. It will introduce an AI-friendly document-writing method, Markdown, to major boards to optimize how content is provided and its contents. Attachments that mainly use Hangul files will also be provided in parallel in document formats that AI can more easily recognise, such as html, odt and pdf.

Kang Sang-wook (강상욱), director general for planning and coordination at the ministry, said, "We expect to minimise errors and misreadings that could occur when AI uses information provided by the website, while increasing the reliability and usability of policy information." He added, "We will continue to improve the digital policy communication environment so both the public and AI can easily and conveniently use government policy information."