AURA is an acronym for Advanced User Resource Annotation. Currently, AURA is a prototype defined as "in progress" by the MSR Community Technologies Group. Moreover, Microsoft Research has made available for download the AURA Mobile Client Beta. The AURA client delivers support for Windows Mobile devices. To put it simply, it enables users to scan product bar codes with the device's camera and then upload the result to the AURA web service.

"The Advanced User Resource Annotation system is designed to provide the ability to access and author annotations on objects and places using machine readable tags. In our system, a user can associate text, threaded conversations, audio, images, video or other data with specific tags. Users can also review the tags and descriptions of the objects they have encountered and annotated in a custom web portal," reads a description of the AURA service.

Under the slogan "Annotate the Planet," AURA enables users to add explanatory tags to various products. Additionally, the products may receive a public rating and a detailed description including category, manufacturer, release date, list and used prices. AURA provides fat links for MSN Shopping and MSN Search, but not only. Amazon.com, Search.com, Half.com at EBay and Usenet Newsgroup threads are also in the list.

"Users may selectively make the items they have scanned public to other AURA users resulting in a collectively authored database rating, reviewing and commenting on a wide range of objects, products and places. Physical annotations can be shared with other users and selected by users' reputation statistics and other properties," additionally reads the AURA description.