  Bipolar magnetic regions (BMRs) are the cornerstone of solar variability.
They are tracers of the large-scale magnetic processes that give rise to the
solar cycle, shapers of the solar corona, building blocks of the large-scale
solar magnetic field, and significant contributors to the free-energetic budget
that gives rise to flares and coronal mass ejections. Surprisingly, no
homogeneous catalog of BMRs exists today, in spite of the existence of
systematic measurements of the magnetic field since the early 1970's. The
purpose of this work is to address this deficiency by creating a homogenous
catalog of BMRs from the 1970's until the present. For this purpose, in this
paper we discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the automatic and manual
detection of BMRs and how both methods can be combined to form the basis of our
Bipolar Active Region Detection (BARD) code and its supporting human
supervision module. At present, the BARD catalog contains more than 10,000
unique BMRs tracked and characterized during every day of their observation.
Here we also discuss our future plans for the creation of an extended
multi-scale magnetic catalog combining the SWAMIS and BARD catalogs.
