Wednesday 16 June 2021

An Impressive Korean Domain Name Front End Website

emmaru.com provides comprehensive information about Korean restaurants, pensions, festivals, hospitals and more. This site also has an online shopping mall. They provide an API to access emmaru content.

There is a very impressive and very clever site which provides a Korean Domain Name (KDN) front end to emmaru content. This front end has not just one KDN link but thousands of KDN links!

So, first of all, letʼs start with the root entry Korean KDNs, which are:

  1. 동맛집.한국 contains 6127 outbound KDN links (checked on 17th June 2021)
  2. 역맛집.한국 contains 1264 outbound KDN links (checked on 17th June 2021)

The number of KDN links may well change over time. If you want to recheck my link numbers then you can use smallseotools.com/website-links-count-checker.

There are a small number of broken links. The broken links I have spotted are those that contain the brackets ( and ) which are illegal characters for a KDN.

In order for me to explain the KDNs it is better if you have some understanding of en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative_divisions_of_South_Korea To make it easier for you, I list below, from major to minor, the division names used in this site's naming of their KDNs.

  1. gun 군 county
  2. gu 구 district
  3. eup 읍 town
  4. myeon 면 township
  5. dong 동 neighbourhood

So, now onto an explanation of the KDN 동맛집.한국. 동 = dong, an administrative division of Korea. 맛집 means restaurant. 한국 is the TLD (Top Level Domain) for Korea (South). The landing page of 동맛집.한국 consists of thousands of live clickable KDN links presented in a table organised hierarchically by adminstrative division. Clicking on a KDN link will result in a list of restaurants for that administrative division being displayed. Here is a screen shot of a small part of the landing page.

Ulsan City Administrative Divisions

The text in the horizontal gray header is 울산 which is Ulsan city in south east Korea en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulsan. The left column lists administrative divisions of Ulsan: namgu 남구, donggu 동구, bukgu 북구, uljugun 울주군, junggu 중구. The right side column is filled with live clickable KDN links. The administrative division name forms part of the KDN. Here are some examples from the screen shot, above. I have coloured the relevant division names green.

  1. mugeodong 무거 무거.맛집.한국
  2. jeonhadong 전하 전하.맛집.한국
  3. yeonamdong 연암 연암.맛집.한국
  4. samnammyeong 삼남 삼남.동맛집.한국
  5. onsaneup 온산 온산.동맛집.한국
  6. dongdong 동.맛집.한국

In the 무거.동맛집.한국 list I noticed Singular Café 싱귤러커피 which is a hanok 한옥 style building en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanok. Very impressive! Here is a kakao road view 카카오로드뷰 so you can see it in situ ➜ http://kko.to/LiUUChofM

Now on to 역맛집.한국 ( station restaurant(s) . korea ). This page presents a table of stations divided into subway stations 지하철역, Korea Train Express 한국고속철도/KTX 케이티엑스 stations and standard train stations 기차역. The table has over a thousand live clickable KDNs. The KDNs are station names and when clicked will display a page listing restaurants near that station. Here is a screen shot of the Seoul Subway Line 7 stations 서울 7호선 part of the 역맛집.한국 landing page.

Seoul Subway Line 7 Stations

The right side table column lists the names of the stations on Line 7. The last character in each name is 역 which means station. The first name is Jangam Station 장암역 which is at the northern end of the line and the last name listed is Bupyeonggu Office station 부평구청역 at the south western end of the line. Seoul subway can be viewed at seoulmetro.co.kr/en/cyberStation.do Here are some of the stations on Line 7.

  1. jangam station 장암역 장암.역맛집.한국
  2. sangbong station 상봉역 상봉.역맛집.한국
  3. isu station 이수역 이수.역맛집.한국
  4. namseong station 남성역 남성.역맛집.한국
  5. cheolsan station 철산역 철산.역맛집.한국
  6. sangdong station 상동역 상동.역맛집.한국

대군코다리 is a restaurant near to dobongsan station 도봉산역 on Line 7 도봉산.역맛집.한국. Here is a 대군코다리 kakao road view 카카오로드뷰 kko.to/_y3B1qo4p.

I have spent many years exploring IDNs (Internationalized Domain Names) of which KDNs are a subset. I have never before encountered a site having such an impressively huge set of IDNs. Here is a brief explanation of the basics of how it works. The KDNs 동맛집.한국 and 역맛집.한국 are registered with the Korean National Registry and are resolved by the Korean National DNS (Domain Name System) servers. X in X.동맛집.한국 and Y.역맛집.한국 are the 7391 KDN subdomains and are entered and resolved in the local DNS which in this case is JooDNS 주디엔에스 DNS joodns.com If you would like to observe what is happening with the DNS servers you can experiment with simpledns.plus/lookup-dg using the KDNs from 동맛집.한국 and 역맛집.한국.

Similarly, but on a much much much smaller scale, my office Mac has the subdomains zaffre and 小山. I set this up in my University's local DNS many years ago. It makes for an interesting demo to my students when I connect remotely to my office Mac using it's 小山 name. Most students are surprised and not expecting it to work🙂

Korean Domain Name 한글 도메인 네임