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DMOZ (from ''directory.mozilla.org'', an earlier
domain name A domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority or control within the Internet. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites, email services and more. As ...
, stylized in lowercase in its logo) was a multilingual open-content
directory Directory may refer to: * Directory (computing), or folder, a file system structure in which to store computer files * Directory (OpenVMS command) * Directory service, a software application for organizing information about a computer network's u ...
of
World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...
links. The site and community who maintained it were also known as the Open Directory Project (ODP). It was owned by
AOL AOL (stylized as Aol., formerly a company known as AOL Inc. and originally known as America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City. It is a brand marketed by the current incarnation of Yahoo (2017 ...
(now a part of
Verizon Media Verizon Communications Inc., commonly known as Verizon, is an American multinational telecommunications conglomerate and a corporate component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The company is headquartered at 1095 Avenue of the Americas i ...
) but constructed and maintained by a
community A community is a social unit (a group of living things) with commonality such as place, norms, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, village, tow ...
of volunteer editors. DMOZ used a hierarchical
ontology In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality. Ontology addresses questions like how entities are grouped into categories and which of these entities exis ...
scheme for organizing site listings. Listings on a similar topic were grouped into categories which then included smaller categories. DMOZ closed on March 17, 2017 because AOL no longer wished to support the project. The website became a single landing page on that day, with links to a static archive of DMOZ, and to the DMOZ discussion forum, where plans to rebrand and relaunch the directory are being discussed. , a non-editable mirror remained available at dmoztools.net, and it was announced that while the DMOZ URL would not return, a successor version of the directory named Curlie would be provided.


History

DMOZ was founded in the United States as Gnuhoo by
Rich Skrenta Richard J. Skrenta Jr. (born June 6, 1967) is an American computer programmer and Silicon Valley entrepreneur who created the web search engine blekko.Arrington, Michael (2008-01-02). "The Next Google Search Challenger: Blekko". TechCrunch, 2 Jan ...
and
Bob Truel Bob Truel is a computer programmer. He met Rich Skrenta in ninth grade in Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania and has since co-founded several Internet ventures with him and others, including DMOZ with Bryn Dole, Chris Tolles, and Jeremy Wenokur in 1998, N ...
in 1998 while they were both working as engineers for
Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...
. Chris Tolles, who worked at Sun Microsystems as the head of marketing for network security products, also signed on in 1998 as a co-founder of Gnuhoo along with co-founders Bryn Dole and Jeremy Wenokur. Skrenta had developed
TASS The Russian News Agency TASS (russian: Информацио́нное аге́нтство Росси́и ТАСС, translit=Informatsionnoye agentstvo Rossii, or Information agency of Russia), abbreviated TASS (russian: ТАСС, label=none) ...
, an ancestor of
tin Tin is a chemical element with the symbol Sn (from la, stannum) and atomic number 50. Tin is a silvery-coloured metal. Tin is soft enough to be cut with little force and a bar of tin can be bent by hand with little effort. When bent, t ...
, the popular threaded
Usenet Usenet () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was ...
newsreader for
Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...
systems. The original category structure of the Gnuhoo directory was based loosely on the structure of Usenet newsgroups then in existence. The Gnuhoo directory went live on June 5, 1998. After
Richard Stallman Richard Matthew Stallman (; born March 16, 1953), also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to ...
and the
Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)#501(c)(3), 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed ...
objected to the use of ''Gnu'' in the name, ''Gnuhoo'' was changed to ''NewHoo''.
Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Man ...
then objected to the use of ''Hoo'' in the name, prompting a proposed name change to ''ZURL''. Prior to switching to ''ZURL'', NewHoo was acquired by
Netscape Communications Corporation Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was onc ...
in October 1998 and became the Open Directory Project. Netscape released Open Directory data under the
Open Directory License The Open Directory License (ODL) is a public copyright license that was used by DMOZ for its content. Unlike open source licenses, the Open Directory License expressly forbids its applicability to software or open content hosted elsewhere. Time Wa ...
. Netscape was acquired by
AOL AOL (stylized as Aol., formerly a company known as AOL Inc. and originally known as America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City. It is a brand marketed by the current incarnation of Yahoo (2017 ...
shortly thereafter and DMOZ was one of the assets included in the acquisition. By the time Netscape assumed stewardship, the Open Directory Project had about 100,000
URLs A Uniform Resource Locator (URL), colloquially termed as a web address, is a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identifie ...
indexed with contributions from about 4500 editors. On October 5, 1999, the number of URLs indexed by DMOZ reached one million. According to an unofficial estimate, the URLs in DMOZ numbered 1.6 million in April 2000, surpassing those in the
Yahoo! Directory The Yahoo! Directory was a web directory which at one time rivaled DMOZ in size. The directory was Yahoo!'s first offering and started in 1994 under the name Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web. When Yahoo! changed its main results to c ...
. DMOZ achieved the milestones of indexing two million URLs on August 14, 2000, three million listings on November 18, 2001, and four million on December 3, 2003. As of April 2013 there were 5,169,995 sites listed in over 1,017,500 categories. On October 31, 2015, there were 3,996,412 sites listed in 1,026,706 categories. In January 2006, DMOZ began publishing online reports to inform the public about the development of the project. The first report covered the year 2005. Monthly reports were issued subsequently until September 2006.ODP reports
by ODP volunteer administrator chris2001
These reports gave greater insight into the functioning of the directory than the simplified statistics provided on the front page of the directory. The number of listings and categories cited on the front page included "Test" and "Bookmarks" categories but these were not included in the RDF dump offered to users. There were about 7330 active editors during August 2006. 75,151 editors had contributed to the directory as of March 31, 2007.ODP Front Page
. Retrieved August 15, 2006
As of April 2013, the number of contributing editors had increased to 97,584.


System failure and editing outage, October to December 2006

On October 20, 2006, DMOZ's main server suffered a
catastrophic failure A catastrophic failure is a sudden and total failure from which recovery is impossible. Catastrophic failures often lead to cascading systems failure. The term is most commonly used for structural failures, but has often been extended to many oth ...
that prevented editors from working on the directory until December 18, 2006. During that period, an older build of the directory was visible to the public. On January 13, 2007, the Site Suggestion and Update Listings forms were again made available. On January 26, 2007, weekly publication of RDF dumps resumed. To avoid future outages, the system resided on a redundant configuration of two Intel-based servers from then on. The site's interface was given an upgrade in 2016, branded "DMOZ 3.0", but AOL took it offline the following year.


Competing and spinoff projects

As DMOZ became more widely known, two other major
web directories A web directory or link directory is an online list or catalog of websites. That is, it is a directory on the World Wide Web of (all or part of) the World Wide Web. Historically, directories typically listed entries on people or businesses, and th ...
edited by volunteers and sponsored by
Go.com Go.com (also known as The Go Network) is a portal for Disney content that was created after The Walt Disney Company acquired the search engine Infoseek. Go.com is operated by Disney Parks, Experiences and Products, one of four divisions of the ...
and
Zeal Zeal may refer to: * Zealotry, fanaticism ** Zeal of the convert * Diligence, the theological virtue opposite to acedia * Zeal (horse), race horse * Zeal (surname) * Zeal (web), an internet directory * Zeal Monachorum, a village in Devon * Sout ...
emerged, both now defunct. These directories did not license their content for open content distribution. The concept of using a large-scale community of editors to compile online content has been successfully applied to other types of projects. DMOZ's editing model directly inspired at least three other open content volunteer projects: music site MusicMoz, an open content restaurant directory known as ChefMoz and an encyclopedia known as
Open Site Open-Site, the Open Encyclopedia Project was a free internet encyclopedia operated by Michael J. Flickinger in an effort to build a free categorized community-built encyclopedia, inspired by DMOZ. The Open Site software was open-source software ...
. Finally, according to
Larry Sanger Lawrence Mark Sanger (; born July 16, 1968) is an American Internet project developer and philosopher who co-founded the online encyclopedia Wikipedia along with Jimmy Wales. Sanger coined the name and wrote much of Wikipedia's original governin ...
, DMOZ was part of the inspiration for the
Nupedia Nupedia was an English-language, online encyclopedia whose articles were written by volunteer contributors with appropriate subject matter expertise, reviewed by expert editors before publication, and licensed as free content. It was founded by ...
project, out of which
Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...
grew.


Logo history

GnuHoo logo.png, Original logo as from June 1998 NewHoo logo.png, Logo after rebranding as ''NewHoo'' Open Directory Project logo.png, Logo after acquisition by Netscape DMOZ Open Directory Project logo.png, Logo from 1999 to 2014 with the name ''DMOZ'' DMOZ logo.png, Logo from March 2014 DMOZ logo.svg, Logo from June 2016 until the closing in March 2017 Curlie-logo.png, Curlie Logo (2019)


Content

Gnuhoo borrowed the basic outline for its initial ontology from
Usenet Usenet () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was ...
. In 1998, Rich Skrenta said, "I took a long list of groups and hand-edited them into a hierarchy." For example, the topic covered by the comp.ai.alife newsgroup was represented by the category Computers/AI/Artificial_Life. The original divisions were for ''Adult'', ''Arts'', ''Business'', ''Computers'', ''Games'', ''Health'', ''Home'', ''News'', ''Recreation'', ''Reference'', ''Regional'', ''Science'', ''Shopping'', ''Society'', ''Sports'' and "World". While these sixteen ''top-level'' categories have remained intact, the ontology of second- and lower-level categories has undergone a gradual evolution; significant changes are initiated by discussion among editors and then implemented when consensus had been reached. In July 1998, the directory became
multilingual Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. More than half of all E ...
with the addition of the ''World'' top-level category. The remainder of the directory lists only English language sites. By May 2005, seventy-five languages were represented. The growth rate of the non-English components of the directory had been greater than the English component since 2002. While the English component of the directory held almost 75% of the sites in 2003, the ''World'' level grew to over 1.5 million sites as of May 2005, forming roughly one-third of the directory. The ontology in non-English categories generally mirrors that of the English directory, although exceptions which reflect language differences are quite common. Several of the top-level categories have unique characteristics. The ''Adult'' category is not present on the directory homepage but it is fully available in the RDF dump that DMOZ provides. While the bulk of the directory is categorized primarily by topic, the Regional category is categorized primarily by region. This has led many to view DMOZ as two parallel directories: ''Regional'' and ''Topical''. On November 14, 2000, a special directory within DMOZ was created for people under 18 years of age. Key factors distinguishing this "Kids and Teens" area from the main directory are: * stricter guidelines which limit the listing of sites to those which are targeted or "appropriate" for people under 18 years of age; * category names as well as site descriptions use vocabulary which is "
age appropriate Age appropriateness refers to people behaving as predicted by their perspective timetable of development. The perspective timetable is embedded throughout people's social life, primarily based on socially-agreed age expectations and age norms. Fo ...
"; * ''age tags'' on each listing distinguish content appropriate for kids (age 12 and under), teens (13 to 15 years old) and mature teens (16 to 18 years old); * Kids and Teens content is available as a separate RDF dump; * editing permissions are such that the community is parallel to that of DMOZ. By May 2005, this portion of DMOZ included over 32,000 site listings. From early 2004, the whole site was in
UTF-8 UTF-8 is a variable-width encoding, variable-length character encoding used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode'' (or ''Universal Coded Character Set'') ''Transformation Format 8-bit'' ...
encoding. Prior to this, the encoding had been ISO 8859-1 for English language categories and a language-dependent character set for other languages. The RDF dumps were encoded in UTF-8 from early 2000.


Maintenance

Directory listings were maintained by editors. While some editors focus on the addition of new listings, others focus on maintaining the existing listings and some did both. This included tasks such as the editing of individual listings to correct spelling and/or grammatical errors, as well as monitoring the status of linked sites. Still others went through site submissions to remove spam and duplicate submissions. Robozilla was a
Web crawler A Web crawler, sometimes called a spider or spiderbot and often shortened to crawler, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web and that is typically operated by search engines for the purpose of Web indexing (''web spid ...
written to check the status of all sites listed in DMOZ. Periodically, Robozilla would flag sites which appeared to have moved or disappeared and editors follow up to check the sites and take action. This process was critical for the directory in striving to achieve one of its founding goals: to reduce the
link rot Link rot (also called link death, link breaking, or reference rot) is the phenomenon of hyperlinks tending over time to cease to point to their originally targeted file, web page, or server due to that resource being relocated to a new address ...
in web directories. Shortly after each run, the sites marked with errors were automatically moved to the unreviewed queue where editors may investigate them when time permits. Due to the popularity of DMOZ and its resulting impact on
search engine A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...
rankings (See
PageRank PageRank (PR) is an algorithm used by Google Search to rank web pages in their search engine results. It is named after both the term "web page" and co-founder Larry Page. PageRank is a way of measuring the importance of website pages. According ...
), domains with lapsed registration that were listed on DMOZ attracted
domain hijacking Domain hijacking or domain theft is the act of changing the registration of a domain name without the permission of its original registrant, or by abuse of privileges on domain hosting and registrar software systems. This can be devastating to ...
, an issue that that was addressed by regularly removing expired domains from the directory. While corporate funding and staff for DMOZ diminished over time, volunteers created editing tools such as linkcheckers to supplement Robozilla, category crawlers, spellcheckers, search tools that directly sift a recent RDF dump,
bookmarklet A bookmarklet is a bookmark stored in a web browser that contains JavaScript commands that add new features to the browser. They are stored as the URL of a bookmark in a web browser or as a hyperlink on a web page. Bookmarklets are usually smal ...
s to help automate some editing functions, mozilla based add-ons, and tools that helped work through unreviewed queues.


License and requirements

DMOZ data was previously made available under the terms of the
Open Directory License The Open Directory License (ODL) is a public copyright license that was used by DMOZ for its content. Unlike open source licenses, the Open Directory License expressly forbids its applicability to software or open content hosted elsewhere. Time Wa ...
, which required a specific DMOZ attribution table on every Web page that uses the data. The Open Directory License also included a requirement that users of the data continually check DMOZ site for updates and discontinue use and distribution of the data or works derived from the data once an update occurs. This restriction prompted the
Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)#501(c)(3), 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed ...
to refer to the
Open Directory License The Open Directory License (ODL) is a public copyright license that was used by DMOZ for its content. Unlike open source licenses, the Open Directory License expressly forbids its applicability to software or open content hosted elsewhere. Time Wa ...
as a non-free documentation license, citing the right to redistribute a given version not being permanent and the requirement to check for changes to the license. In 2011, DMOZ silently changed its license to a
Creative Commons Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...
Attribution license, which is a free license (and GPL compatible).


RDF dumps

DMOZ data is made available through an RDF-like dump that is published on a download server, older versions are also archived there. New versions are usually generated weekly. A DMOZ editor has catalogued a number of bugs that are encountered in the DMOZ RDF dump, most importantly that the file format isn't RDF. So while today the so-called RDF dump is valid
XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable ...
, it is not valid RDF and as such, software to process the DMOZ RDF dump needs to be specifically written for DMOZ data.


Content users

DMOZ data powers the core
directory service In computing, a directory service or name service maps the names of network resources to their respective network addresses. It is a shared information infrastructure for locating, managing, administering and organizing everyday items and network r ...
s for many of the Web's largest search engines and portals, including Netscape Search, AOL Search, and
Alexa Alexa may refer to: Technology *Amazon Alexa, a virtual assistant developed by Amazon * Alexa Internet, a defunct website ranking and traffic analysis service * Arri Alexa, a digital motion picture camera People * Alexa (name), a given name a ...
.
Google Directory The Google Directory was a web directory hosted by Google. It was discontinued on July 20, 2011. However, the Google business places and recommended businesses is now commonly referred to as the Google directory. Information The Google Directory ...
used DMOZ information, until being shuttered in July 2011. Other uses are also made of DMOZ data. For example, in the spring of 2004
Overture Overture (from French ''ouverture'', "opening") in music was originally the instrumental introduction to a ballet, opera, or oratorio in the 17th century. During the early Romantic era, composers such as Beethoven and Mendelssohn composed overt ...
announced a search service for third parties combining Yahoo! Directory search results with DMOZ titles, descriptions and category metadata. The search engine Gigablast announced on May 12, 2005, its searchable copy of DMOZ. The technology permits search of websites listed in specific categories, "in effect, instantly creating over 500,000 vertical search engines". , DMOZ listed 313 English-language Web sites that use DMOZ data as well as 238 sites in other languages. However, these figures do not reflect the full picture of use, as those sites that use DMOZ data without following the terms of the DMOZ license are not listed.


Policies and procedures

Restrictions are imposed on who can become an DMOZ editor. The primary gatekeeping mechanism is an editor application process wherein editor candidates demonstrate their editing abilities, disclose affiliations that might pose a conflict of interest, and otherwise give a sense of how the applicant would likely mesh with the DMOZ culture and mission. A majority of applications are rejected but reapplying is allowed and sometimes encouraged. The same standards apply to editors of all categories and subcategories. DMOZ's editing model is a
hierarchical A hierarchy (from Greek: , from , 'president of sacred rites') is an arrangement of items (objects, names, values, categories, etc.) that are represented as being "above", "below", or "at the same level as" one another. Hierarchy is an important ...
one. Upon becoming editors, individuals will generally have editing permissions in only a small category. Once they have demonstrated basic editing skills in compliance with the Editing Guidelines, they are welcome to apply for additional editing privileges in either a broader category or else another category in the directory. Mentorship relationships between editors are encouraged, and internal forums provide a vehicle for new editors to ask questions. DMOZ has its own internal forums, the contents of which are intended only for editors to communicate with each other primarily about editing topics. Access to the forums requires an editor account and editors are expected to keep the contents of these forums private. Over time, senior editors can be granted additional privileges which reflect their editing experience and leadership within the editing community. The most straightforward is ''edit all'' privileges, which allow an editor to access all categories in the directory. ''Meta'' privileges additionally allow editors to perform tasks such as reviewing editor applications, setting category features, and handling external and internal abuse reports. ''Cateditall'' privileges are similar to ''edit all'', but only for a single directory category. Similarly, ''catmod'' privileges are similar to ''meta'', but only for a single directory category. ''Catmv'' privileges allow editors to make changes to directory ontology by moving or renaming categories. All of these privileges are granted by admins and staff, usually after discussion with ''meta'' editors. In August 2004, a new level of privileges called ''admin'' was introduced. Administrator status was granted to a number of long serving metas by staff. Administrators have the ability to grant editall+ privileges to other editors and to approve new directory-wide policies, powers which had previously only been available to root (staff) editors. All DMOZ editors are expected to abide by DMOZ's Editing Guidelines. These guidelines describe editing basics: which types of sites may be listed and which may not; how site listings should be titled and described in a loosely consistent manner; conventions for the naming and building of categories; conflict of interest limitations on the editing of sites which the editor may own or otherwise be affiliated with; and a code of conduct within the community. Editors who are found to have violated these guidelines may be contacted by staff or senior editors, have their editing permissions cut back, or lose their editing privileges entirely. DMOZ Guidelines are periodically revised after discussion in editor forums.


Controversy and criticism

There have long been allegations that volunteer DMOZ editors give favorable treatment to their own websites while concomitantly thwarting the good faith efforts of their competition. Such allegations are fielded by ODP's staff and meta editors, who have the authority to take disciplinary action against volunteer editors who are suspected of engaging in abusive editing practices. In 2003, DMOZ introduced a new ''Public Abuse Report System'' that allows members of the general public to report and track allegations of abusive editor conduct using an online form. Uninhibited discussion of DMOZ's purported shortcomings has become more common on mainstream
webmaster A webmaster is a person responsible for maintaining one or more websites. The title may refer to web architects, web developers, site authors, website administrators, website owners, website coordinators, or website publishers. The duties of ...
discussion forums. Although site policies suggest that an individual site should be submitted to only one category, as of October 2007, Topix.com, a news aggregation site operated by DMOZ founder Rich Skrenta, had more than 17,000 listings. Early in the history of DMOZ, its staff gave representatives of selected companies, such as ''
Rolling Stone ''Rolling Stone'' is an American monthly magazine that focuses on music, politics, and popular culture. It was founded in San Francisco, San Francisco, California, in 1967 by Jann Wenner, and the music critic Ralph J. Gleason. It was first kno ...
'' or
CNN CNN (Cable News Network) is a multinational cable news channel headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. Founded in 1980 by American media proprietor Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld as a 24-hour cable news channel, and presently owned by ...
, editing access in order to list individual pages from their websites. Links to individual CNN articles were added until 2004, but were entirely removed from the directory in January 2008 due to the content being outdated and not considered worth the effort to maintain. There have been no similar experiments with the editing policy since then.


Ownership and management

Underlying some controversy surrounding DMOZ is its ownership and management. Some of the original GnuHoo volunteers felt that they had been deceived into joining a commercial enterprise. To varying degrees, those complaints have continued up until the present. At DMOZ's inception, there was little thought given to the idea of how DMOZ should be managed and there were no official forums, guidelines or FAQs. As time went on, the ODP editor forums became the de facto DMOZ parliament, and when one of DMOZ's staff members would post an opinion in the forums, it would be considered an official ruling. Even so, DMOZ staff began to give trusted senior editors additional editing privileges, including the ability to approve new editor applications, which eventually led to a stratified hierarchy of duties and privileges among DMOZ editors, with DMOZ's paid staff having the final say regarding DMOZ's policies and procedures. Robert Keating, a principal of Touchstone Consulting Group in Washington, D.C. since 2006, worked as AOL's program manager for DMOZ since 2004. He started working for AOL in 1999 as senior editor for AOL Search, then as managing editor, AOL Search, DMOZ, and then as media ecosystem manager, AOL Product Marketing.


Editor removal procedures

DMOZ's editor removal procedures are overseen by DMOZ's staff and meta-editors. According to DMOZ's official editorial guidelines, editors are removed for abusive editing practices or uncivil behaviour. Discussions that may result in disciplinary action against volunteer editors take place in a private forum which can only be accessed by DMOZ's staff and meta editors. Volunteer editors who are being discussed are not given notice that such proceedings are taking place. Some people find this arrangement distasteful, wanting instead a discussion modeled more like a trial held in the U.S. judicial system. In the article "Editor Removal Explained", DMOZ meta editor Arlarson states that "a great deal of confusion about the removal of editors from DMOZ results from false or misleading statements by former editors". The DMOZ's confidentiality guidelines prohibit any current DMOZ editors in a position to know anything from discussing the reasons for specific editor removals, however a list of potential reasons was provided in the guidelines. In the past, this has led to removed DMOZ editors wondering why they cannot log in at DMOZ to perform their editing work. David F. Prenatt, Jr., former DMOZ editor ''netesq'', and another former editor known by the alias ''The Cunctator'', both claim to have been removed for disagreeing with staff about changes to policies, particularly DMOZ's
copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, education ...
policies. According to their claims, staff use the excuse of uncivil behaviour as a means to remove bothersome editors.


Blacklisting allegations

Senior DMOZ editors have the ability to attach "warning" or "do not list" notes to individual domains but no editor has the unilateral ability to block certain sites from being listed. Sites with these notes might still be listed and at times notes are removed after some discussion.


Hierarchical structure

Criticism of DMOZ's
hierarchical A hierarchy (from Greek: , from , 'president of sacred rites') is an arrangement of items (objects, names, values, categories, etc.) that are represented as being "above", "below", or "at the same level as" one another. Hierarchy is an important ...
structure emerged by around 2005. Many believe hierarchical directories are too complicated. With the emergence of
Web 2.0 Web 2.0 (also known as participative (or participatory) web and social web) refers to websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture and interoperability (i.e., compatibility with other products, systems, and ...
, folksonomies began to appear, and some editors proposed that folksonomies,
networks Network, networking and networked may refer to: Science and technology * Network theory, the study of graphs as a representation of relations between discrete objects * Network science, an academic field that studies complex networks Mathematics ...
and
directed graph In mathematics, and more specifically in graph theory, a directed graph (or digraph) is a graph that is made up of a set of vertices connected by directed edges, often called arcs. Definition In formal terms, a directed graph is an ordered pa ...
s are more "natural" and easier to manage than hierarchies.


Software


Search

The ODPSearch software is a derivative version of
Isearch Isearch is open-source text retrieval software first developed in 1994 by Nassib Nassar as part of the Isite Z39.50 information framework. The project started at the Clearinghouse for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval (CNIDR) of t ...
which is
open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...
, licensed under the
Mozilla Public License The Mozilla Public License (MPL) is a free and open-source weak copyleft license for most Mozilla Foundation software such as Firefox and Thunderbird The MPL license is developed and maintained by Mozilla, which seeks to balance the concerns ...
.


Editor forums

The ODP Editor Forums were originally run on software that was based on the proprietary Ultimate Bulletin Board system. In June 2003, they switched to the open source
phpBB phpBB is an Internet forum package written in the PHP scripting language. The name "phpBB" is an abbreviation of ''PHP Bulletin Board''. Available under the GNU General Public License, phpBB is free and open-source. Features of phpBB include ...
system. As of 2007, these forums were powered by a modified version of phpBB.


Bug tracking

The bug tracking software used by the ODP is
Bugzilla Bugzilla is a web-based general-purpose bug tracking system and testing tool originally developed and used by the Mozilla project, and licensed under the Mozilla Public License. Released as open-source software by Netscape Communications in 199 ...
and the web server
Apache The Apache () are a group of culturally related Native American tribes in the Southwestern United States, which include the Chiricahua, Jicarilla, Lipan, Mescalero, Mimbreño, Ndendahe (Bedonkohe or Mogollon and Nednhi or Carrizaleño an ...
.
Squid True squid are molluscs with an elongated soft body, large eyes, eight arms, and two tentacles in the superorder Decapodiformes, though many other molluscs within the broader Neocoleoidea are also called squid despite not strictly fitting t ...
web proxy server was also used but it was removed in August 2007 when the storage servers were reorganized. All these applications are open source.


Interface

The DMOZ database/editing software is closed source (although Richard Skrenta has said in June 1998 that he was considering licensing it under the
GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the Four Freedoms (Free software), four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was th ...
). This has led to criticism from the aforementioned GNU project, many of whom also criticized the DMOZ content license. The content was later released under a Creative Commons license, which is compatible with the GNU license. As such, there have been some efforts to provide alternatives to DMOZ. These alternatives would allow communities of like-minded editors to set up and maintain their own open source/open content Web directories.


ChefMoz

Chef Moz, an offshoot of DMOZ, was an open content
directory Directory may refer to: * Directory (computing), or folder, a file system structure in which to store computer files * Directory (OpenVMS command) * Directory service, a software application for organizing information about a computer network's u ...
of
World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...
links of restaurants. The website was constructed and maintained by a
community A community is a social unit (a group of living things) with commonality such as place, norms, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, village, tow ...
of
volunteer Volunteering is a voluntary act of an individual or group freely giving time and labor for community service. Many volunteers are specifically trained in the areas they work, such as medicine, education, or emergency rescue. Others serve ...
editors, and owned by
Netscape Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was onc ...
. Chef Moz, similar to its parent DMOZ, used a hierarchical
ontology In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality. Ontology addresses questions like how entities are grouped into categories and which of these entities exis ...
scheme for organizing site listings. Listings on a similar topic were grouped into categories, which can then include smaller categories. On 17 February 2011, DMOZ administrator "lisagirl" confirmed that Chef Moz was dead.


Growth

From its beginning in 2000 to November 2009 (when it became impossible for editors to log into the site), ChefMoz had grown to become the largest global directory of restaurants on the internet. The total number of restaurants indexed since 2000 is recorded in the following table:Statistics from th
Wayback Machine
/ref>


See also

*
List of web directories A Web directory is a listing of Websites organized in a hierarchy or interconnected list of categories. The following is a list of notable Web directory services. General * DOAJ.org – Directory of Open Access Journals * DMOZ (also known as ...


References


External links

* (closed as of 2017-03-14) ** *
Archive of dmoz.org
(Accessed May 14, 2021)
dmoztools.net
DMOZ static mirror
Curlie
The successor to DMOZ
Chef Moz
at the Internet Archive {{AOL Inc. 1998 establishments in the United States AOL Collaboration Internet properties established in 1998 Mozilla Netscape Open content projects Internet properties disestablished in 2017 Multilingual websites Web directories