Ocularium

Ocularium is a project to create a public database of "cultural context" around existing digital media objects, especially if access or use of those objects is currently restricted by legal or technical means. With Ocularium, anyone should be able to create tags, commentary, and structural metadata (e.g. versioning and provenance information) in the public commons for all media objects, public or private. In the future, if a cultural object is lost, then we all will still have a digital "handle" so we can remember what it was, and if the object is kept hidden by a controlling party, then the door to recovery is left open.

The first stage of the Ocularium project will be to create a system of "didactic" tags on academic lectures. The purpose is make it easier for students and educators to find lessons about specific topics and to allow users ot organize these tags into clusters that can be arranged into customized "courses" of material.

• NOTE: The Ocularium wiki is a work in progress. Nothing stated here should be considered an accurate prediction of the future.