At The Korea Times roundtable “Beyond US-China AI race: Korea's strategic edge,” experts said Korea needs to diversify its AI strategy beyond developing advanced models and expand efforts to build AI-ready knowledge systems, infrastructure and a regulatory environment supporting practical applications. Participants called for greater efforts to build ontologies — structured knowledge systems organizing government data, institutional knowledge and their relationships into forms AI can understand and use — and agreed on the necessity of a sandbox area where AI-powered technologies could be tested and deployed under a more flexible regulatory framework. Reform Party of Korea Rep. Lee Jun-seok stressed the government’s AI strategy should focus on building national ontologies, not distributing free chatbots to the general public, and said a key policy should have required each ministry to develop its own ontology and submit a detailed implementation plan. During last month’s National Assembly audit of the Public Procurement Service, Lee’s office converted raw data on 1.05 million products registered with the agency and 2.8 million procurement orders into ontologies and developed an AI program to analyze the data; the analysis uncovered signs of potential misuse of 562.8 billion won ($418.4 million) in taxpayer money, including power strips normally priced at 60,000 won supplied in large quantities to public institutions for 200,000 won each. Lee said his office is working on another project to convert all of Korea’s laws, enforcement decrees and municipal ordinances into ontologies and has already identified more than