How to Use Gwanmat

Korean public agencies disclose every month where they spent their official expense budget and how much. Those files contain the restaurant name, the amount, the date, and the department. We copy those values as they are, group identical restaurants, and count how often each one appears by neighborhood.

It is meant for a quick look when you need to book a dinner on a business trip, or when you are curious where the people from the local government office go in your own neighborhood.

Sources are the Korean open data portal(공공데이터포털) and each agency's own disclosure files. Which file we took, when, and under what license is written at the bottom of each agency page. Files whose license we could not confirm are not loaded.

Even when a disclosure file lists the officer or attendees by name, we do not copy those. We copy only the restaurant name, address, amount, date, department, and purpose. Purpose text is either left verbatim or left out, never summarized.

Disclosure files mix in condolence money and supply purchases alongside meals, so we filter with one word rule. A row is loaded only when its purpose text contains a word like meeting, luncheon, dinner, meal, tea meeting, consultation, or discussion(간담회, 오찬, 만찬, 식사, 회식, 다과, 차담회, 업무협의, 논의, 회의), and dropped when it contains words like condolence, wreath, membership fee, supplies, or gift. Bank transfers and cash are dropped. That rule is the entire meaning of the word restaurant on this site, and the number of dropped rows with reasons is printed on each agency page.

• It does not say the food is good. All we know is how many times and how much. A frequent place may just be close to the agency or good at seating groups.
• It does not say the spending was improper. We show disclosed spending as it is; judging its appropriateness is the auditors' job.
• It does not know whether the place is still open. These are records dated in the file, and the restaurant may have changed since.
• Some records have no address. When a file gives only a name, we group the place under the paying agency's location, and the restaurant page says so.

Neighborhood pages are ordered by how many different departments went there. One department going a hundred times makes that department's regular spot, but fifty departments each finding the same place have no reason to share a taste. Ties are broken by number of payments, then by total amount. That is the only meaning of the order.

Files without a department column count the agency itself as one department, so in a neighborhood with only such agencies the department count equals the number of paying agencies.

A restaurant page shows at most the 30 most recent payments. The full list is in the original file linked from the agency page.

When the same restaurant is spelled slightly differently(spacing, branch name), it stays as separate rows. Merging them would be our judgment, so we keep what the file says.

We only load agencies that publish machine-readable files with a stated license. Agencies that publish only HWP or PDF, state no license, or whose files did not open are not here yet. The list of what we opened and what we could not, with dates, is in docs/prior-art.md in the repository.

Not inventing missing agencies is a rule of this app, so for those please see the disclosure section of the agency's own website.