News Panorama In the midst of fierce competition between the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the Ministry of Information and Communication regarding content identifiers, the former will unveil the first results of its application of its selfdeveloped content object identifier (COI). As a result, in a situation in which the Office for Government Policy Coordination is currently attuning the related matters, whether or not the Ministry of Culture and Tourism will be able to definitely show the utility of its COI and, thereby, capture an advantageous position is capturing much attention. On April 11, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the Korea Culture and Content Agency announced that they will begin their COI service. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism has stated that it has completed the application of the COI onto a total of 11.14 million pieces of digital cultural contents until now. Together with the portal site Daum, it has been working on a service in which original form cultural contents are grafted with the COI so that contents can be easily purchased from Daum. Also, together with the Korea Press Foundation and NHN, it has been working on the 'Aqua Project' which carries out systematic management by applying the COI onto over 10.7 million article contents. And it has also been working on the 'Korea Music Contents Standard Meta Database Project' which attaches identifiers to over 300,000 musical contents and utilizes them for distribution. Earlier, in December last year, the ministry had selected 6 COI registration and management organizations, including the Korea Culture and Content Agency, the Korea Press Foundation, and others. Na Moon-sung, Head of the Contents Distribution Team of the Korea Culture and Content Agency said, "The COI is a suitable identifying system for cultural contents which are based on intellectual property rights." He expressed his expectation by saying, "The COI will bring forth rights protection to producers, efficient profits to distributors, and a transparent digital cultural contents distribution environment to consumers." A related person in the contents industry said, "The core of the contents identifying system is the certain and convenient management of copyright information. This will be a good opportunity for seeing whether the COI of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism can be wellapplied to the industry." Meanwhile, in August last year, the Ministry of Information and Communication had selected SBSi, Hanaro Dream, and Zone & Zone. And it had proceeded with an example service that grafted its own, self-developed contents identifying system called the "UCI" (Universal & Ubiquitous Content Identifier).