For planning and developing rural regions, it is very important to understand and utilize regional characteristics including social, demographic, and economic aspects. The purpose of this study is to find effective analysis techniques and provide a procedure design for mining regional characteristics in South Korea through reviewing and analyzing 41 related studies. The engaged research methods can be classified into five categories (PCA+CA, PCA, CA, GIS, and PCA+GIS) with the combination of three methodologies: principal component analysis (PCA), cluster analysis (CA), and geographical information system (GIS). The combination of PCA and CA occupied about 40 % of research methods used in related studies. The analysis tool of Korean Rural Information Supporting System (KRISS) is designed based on the outcomes of this study and applied to classify the regional capacity of agriculture using agricultural census data (2000) for evaluating its applicability.