A new standard has been finalized to use unique numbers instead of place names on the world's ocean maps. The long-running dispute between Korea and Japan over "East Sea" and "Sea of Japan" has effectively come to an end.
According to the Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries and foreign media on the 25th, the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) finally approved "S-130," a digital dataset standard, at its fourth assembly held in Monaco from the 19th to the 23rd.
S-130 manages seas worldwide with a number-based identification system rather than names, characterized by assigning a unique number by combining the latitude and longitude of each sea's center point.
It comes about six years after the second assembly in 2020 agreed to revise the existing nautical gazetteer "S-23," and within the IHO system going forward, every sea will have a unique identification number, like a resident registration number.
This is because number-based identification is far more suitable than names when using electronic navigation or geographic information systems, and it is expected to combine the latitude and longitude of each sea's center point.
The existing standard nautical gazetteer S-23, which labeled the East Sea solely as the Sea of Japan when its first edition was published in 1929 during the Japanese colonial period, has lost its standard status after about 100 years.
At the time, Korea was under Japanese colonial rule and could not participate in the naming process at all, and later waged a diplomatic campaign from 1997 calling for parallel use of East Sea.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the adoption of S-130 "is meaningful as the result of multifaceted diplomatic efforts made thus far." The S-23 nautical gazetteer, which had been the existing standard, will remain only as a reference from the analog era.