A self-employed person surnamed Kim (35) recently went to the National Tax Service website to register a business sites for tax purposes and ran into trouble. Kim does not use HANCOM Office, but because public documents are supported only in HWP (Hangul) format, he had to buy HANCOM Office, saying it was like swallowing bitter medicine. Kim said, "I don't understand why public institutions have always processed documents using only specific software (SW)," and added, "They should add other SW options to widen citizens' choice in accessing government documents."
Global artificial intelligence (AI) competition is accelerating, but the government and public sector still insist on using HANCOM Office centered on HWP. As a result, people say their choice of SW is limited and that the government is helping specific corporations. Voices are growing that improvements are needed for global compatibility and public data use.
◇ Deep-rooted HANCOM Office monopoly problem… inconvenience falls on the public
According to the industry on the 9th, most documents produced by the government and public institutions are currently circulated as HWP extension files. Exact figures have not been disclosed, but government and public institutions use HANCOM Office formats as the standard more than Microsoft (MS) Office. This runs counter to changes in the SW market. MS Office has already become the dominant office SW in the domestic market. The industry estimates HANCOM Office's share at about 30%.
HANCOM Office's domination of government and public institutions stems from encouragement to use domestic SW. In 1998 HANCOM (Hangeul and Computer) abandoned additional investment in Hangul due to poor management and sought to accept capital from U.S. MS. The government and public institutions then led a campaign to promote the use of genuine software. The idea that the public sector should set an example in using genuine software to develop the domestic software industry became the origin of government agencies using HANCOM Office today.
Since then, although using HANCOM Office is not an official obligation, improvement has not been made because it has become a convention. An official at the Ministry of the Interior and Safety said, "The ministry's regulations on administration operations and innovation include explanations about document creation procedures, but there is no regulation stating that specific SW must be used." A public servant who requested anonymity said, "Even if it's not in the regulations, using HANCOM Office is almost mandatory in work," and added, "Because of the nature of public service culture, there is a strong practice of doing things stably as they have been done, so there are aspects that prevent attempts at change."
◇ Half-hearted open use… "Diversify SW to increase data use"
While the government insists on HANCOM Office, the public suffers the consequences. Because public document services are discriminatory, file formats used in the private sector differ, causing document compatibility problems. Also, because users must buy HANCOM Office to access public documents, there are criticisms that the government is helping a specific corporation's business. Despite the government's encouragement of domestic SW, other domestic office SW such as Polaris Office are hardly used for public document services. In 2018 a petition on the Blue House public petition board asking to ban HWP monopoly by public institutions was even posted, but there was no change.
In the global AI era, voices are growing that improvements are needed to increase compatibility and public data use. For AI to learn from public data, documents must be in machine-readable formats, but nonstandard HWP document files cannot be used directly for big data analysis. To address this, HANCOM converted the default HANCOM Office document format from the closed HWP to the open HWPX in 2021. HWPX is a machine-readable document that allows data classification and extraction without separate processing steps.
However, there are still limits to data use if users use past documents already written in HWP or do not use the HWPX version of HANCOM Office. An IT industry official said, "Public institution documents written in HWP cannot be read by machines, so a lot of data is effectively wasted," and added, "To use HWP documents as data, their content must be read by optical character recognition (OCR) technology, and the read data must be stored again, which is inefficient."
A Ministry of the Interior and Safety official explained, "The Ministry of Government Legislation has required since 2022 that press releases, public notices and research service reports use open extensions, so related official documents are coming out as HWPX files," and added, "Also, the conversion from HWP to HWPX is being carried out sequentially."
Kim Seung-joo, professor at Korea University Graduate School of Information Security, said, "The government has said it does not force the use of HANCOM Office, but because HANCOM Office is used in most government and public institutions, practical improvements are needed," and added, "There is a global standard, yet the bias toward specific SW is creating an 'IT Galapagos' isolated IT environment."