We describe the world by using words. Yet, words usually bring to mind different mental views of the world in different individuals, because of their personal experience and context. This is the reason why the "semantic gap" between our conceptualizations of the world, expressed using language, and our experience of the world, whose most direct representations are media, is far beyond the reach of current systems; and it is also why, so far, a universal solution of the problem of contextualizing search, navigation, and media management in general to the user needs and the operating environment has not been found.The key idea underlying GLOCAL is to use events as the primary means to organize and index media, e.g., photos, videos, journal articles. Instead of starting from media and seeing, a posteriori, how we can meaningfully understand their contents (e.g., by tagging them), we organize a priori our data and knowledge in terms of events and use media to populate them, thus providing their experiential dimension. Events provide the common framework inside which the local experience-driven contextual information can be not only coded, but also shared and reduced to a common denominator.Events have both a local and a global dimension. The local dimension enables the mapping of tags (conceptualizations) to media (personal experiences), while the global dimension enables the sharing of event descriptions (thus enabling social sharing and networking of events, media, and tags) but also of event structures across similar events, thus providing a common way to index media (social sharing and networking of event structures). In turn, the networking of events and event structures enables the creation of networked communities inside which common (global) descriptions of the world can be built and continuously enriched by the continuous flow of individual (local) descriptions.