However well a lab builds a product, that alone doesn’t mean it can be sold out in the world.
It only becomes something you can sell once it’s certified as “safe” in each country. And certification is no small thing. You keep going back and forth on requirements with government-affiliated agencies, and if something doesn’t fit, you have to tear the product apart and rework it, while development costs snowball. The trouble is that lab people, focused on design and fabrication, keep pushing this process to later. Certification isn’t a chore to deal with after development is done; it’s a condition you need to know from the start and build into the design.
Certification requirements ultimately come from the law, and the law is built in layers. At the top are statutes, which set the broad principles (“High-pressure gas must be managed safely”). Below them, enforcement decrees and enforcement rules fill in the details the statute leaves to them. The highly detailed standards used directly in day-to-day work are notices and technical standards. In our field, that’s the KGS Code, written by the Korea Gas Safety Corporation. Our lab handles high-pressure gas, so the High-Pressure Gas Safety Control Act is the baseline, and the KGS Code is the working guideline.
But finding anything in all this was a real ordeal. Where does a term related to our product appear in the law? Where is it buried among dozens of certification guidelines that exist only as PDFs? The person in charge dug through it all by hand. “Couldn’t this be easier to find?” So I decided to pull out just this part and build a site where it could be searched. There were only two rules. Use only public material (statutes, notices, and the KGS Code are all public, so there’s no chance of company secrets leaking), and don’t use AI (to keep costs as low as possible).
- 1. Collect
- Downloaded the original texts of public statutes, enforcement decrees, and enforcement rules, plus the KGS Code and its appended tables, which existed only as one PDF per code, then extracted and organized the text
- 2. Split
- Broke everything down to article, paragraph, and subparagraph, and attached a source tag saying “which law and which article this came from”
- 3. Search
- Keyword search with no AI · a space means AND,
ORmeans OR, and double quotes match the exact phrase
Instead of calling the government’s legal information API live, I downloaded the original texts once and organized them on our side. There was a reason. The government’s legal information site was often unstable under heavy traffic, and the KGS Code wasn’t in the API to begin with — it’s a separate PDF for each code — so it had to be downloaded separately anyway. I didn’t want every search to depend, in real time, on someone else’s unstable service. I secured the public original texts like a snapshot and made them quick and reliable to search on our own site.
Not using AI here was the key. What legal search needs isn’t a plausible summary. What matters is finding the provision that contains exactly that word. Type “high-pressure gas” (고압가스), and the provisions containing those words should come up exactly as written; AI paraphrasing and explaining on its own only gets in the way. What turned out to be truly useful wasn’t simple search but comparison. I moved onto the screen the cross-checking the person in charge used to do with several PDFs spread out side by side. It lines up the KGS Codes by their tables of contents and shows, in a single row, how the same item differs from code to code. Enter a single keyword such as “storage” (저장), and it charts the relevant passages of the statute, the enforcement rules, and several KGS Codes side by side. What used to mean opening PDFs one at a time to compare, you now see on one screen.
Good search quality came not from AI, but from organizing the material well.
This site costs practically nothing. The server is Vercel’s free plan (plenty for in-house scale), the data is public statute texts and the KGS Code (no need to buy a paid legal database), and the AI cost is zero (since it doesn’t use any). Public data, a free server, and well-built search. With just those three, work that took people days now takes seconds. It was cheap and accurate precisely because I left AI out. It turns out you don’t need to put the latest AI on top just to make things easier. Decide what kind of problem it is first, then choose the tool. Once I defined this problem not as ‘a plausible summary’ but as ‘finding the provision that contains exactly that word,’ the answer was search, not AI — and I intend to keep working in that order.
Try it yourself
High-pressure gas law & KGS Code search
Don’t just read about it — get your hands on it. I’ve opened it up so you can search the public High-Pressure Gas Safety Control Act and the KGS Code directly (the site is in Korean). Enter a single word such as 저장 (“storage”) and click through to the screen that compares several codes side by side, and you’ll feel right away how “digging through PDFs by hand” turned into a matter of seconds.
A researcher on a team that takes technology into mass production. Working where a handful of people weather a flood of requirements, I’m trying to set AI up not as a search tool but as hands and feet. I write more about what didn’t work than what did, and more about process than conclusions.