Open Directory Project
URL	http://www.dmoz.org/
Commercial?	No
Type of site	Web directory
Registration	Optional
Owner	Netscape (Time Warner)
Created by	Netscape
Launched	June 5, 1998

The Open Directory Project (ODP), also known as dmoz (from directory. Uniform Resource Locator is an URI which also specifies where the identified resource is available and the protocol for retrieving it A web directory or link directory is a directory on the World Wide Web. Netscape Communications (formerly known as Netscape Communications Corporation and commonly known as Netscape) is an American computer services company Time Warner Inc ( is the world's largest media and entertainment conglomerate, headquartered in New York City. Netscape Communications (formerly known as Netscape Communications Corporation and commonly known as Netscape) is an American computer services company Events 70 - Titus and his Roman Legions breach the middle wall of Jerusalem in the Siege of Jerusalem Year 1998 ( MCMXCVIII) was a Common year starting on Thursday (link will display full 1998 Gregorian calendar) mozilla. org, its original domain name), is a multilingual open content directory of World Wide Web links owned by Netscape that is constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors. In Computer networking, a domain name is a name given to a collection of network devices that belong to a domain which is an administrative space managed according Open content, a Neologism coined by analogy with " Open source " describes any kind of Creative work published in a format that explicitly allows A web directory or link directory is a directory on the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web (commonly shortened to the Web) is a system of interlinked Hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. Netscape Communications (formerly known as Netscape Communications Corporation and commonly known as Netscape) is an American computer services company A virtual community, e-community or online community is a group of people that primarily interact via communication media such as Newsletters A volunteer is someone who works for a community or for the benefit of environment primarily because they choose to do so

ODP uses a hierarchical ontology scheme for organizing site listings. An ontology in both Computer science and Information science is a formal representation of a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between Listings on a similar topic are grouped into categories, which can then include smaller categories.

Project information

ODP was founded as Gnuhoo by Rich Skrenta and Bob Truel in 1998. Richard "Rich" Skrenta (b1967 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is a computer programmer and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Bob Truel is a Computer programmer. He co-founded the Open Directory Project with Rich Skrenta, Bryn Dole, Chris Tolles and Jeremy Wenokur in At the time, Skrenta and Truel were working as engineers for Sun Microsystems. Sun Microsystems Inc ( is a multinational vendor of Computers computer components Computer software, and Information technology services 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 was already well known for his role in developing TASS, an ancestor of tin, the popular threaded Usenet newsreader for Unix systems. The Tass newsreader is an Open source computer software package that provides a full screen threaded newsreader tin is an Open source text-based and threaded News client. It is available for a variety of Unix-like Operating systems It is based on Usenet, a Portmanteau of "user" and "network" is a world-wide distributed Internet discussion system Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX, sometimes also written as Unix with Small caps) is a computer Coincidentally, 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. Events 70 - Titus and his Roman Legions breach the middle wall of Jerusalem in the Siege of Jerusalem Year 1998 ( MCMXCVIII) was a Common year starting on Thursday (link will display full 1998 Gregorian calendar) After a Slashdot article suggested that Gnuhoo had nothing in common with the spirit of free software,^[1] for which the GNU project was known, Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation objected to the use of Gnu. Slashdot, often abbreviated as /, is a technology-related news Website owned by SourceForge Inc Free software or software libre is Software that can be used studied and modified without restriction and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified GNU ( pronounced) is a computer Operating system composed entirely of Free software. The Free Software Foundation ( FSF) is a Non-profit corporation founded by Richard Stallman on 4 October 1985 to support the Free software movement So Gnuhoo was changed to NewHoo. Yahoo then objected to the use of "Hoo" in the name, prompting them to switch the name again. ZURL was the likely choice. However, before the switch to ZURL, NewHoo was acquired by Netscape Communications Corporation in October of 1998 and became the Open Directory Project. Netscape Communications (formerly known as Netscape Communications Corporation and commonly known as Netscape) is an American computer services company Netscape released the ODP data under the Open Directory License. The Open Directory License is a License used by the Open Directory Project for its content Netscape was acquired by AOL shortly thereafter, and ODP was one of the assets included in the acquisition. AOL later merged with Time-Warner. Time Warner Inc ( is the world's largest media and entertainment conglomerate, headquartered in New York City.

By the time Netscape assumed stewardship, the Open Directory Project had about 100,000 URLs indexed with contributions from about 4500 editors. Uniform Resource Locator is an URI which also specifies where the identified resource is available and the protocol for retrieving it On October 5, 1999, the number of URLs indexed by ODP reached one million. Events 869 - The Fourth Council of Constantinople is convened to decide about what to do about Patriarch Photius of Constantinople Year 1999 ( MCMXCIX) was a Common year starting on Friday (link will display full 1999 Gregorian calendar) According to an unofficial estimate, the number of URLs in the Open Directory surpassed the number of URLs in the Yahoo! Directory in April 2000 with about 1. The Yahoo! Directory is a Web directory which rivals the Open Directory Project in size 6 million URLs. ODP 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. Events 1183 - Taira no Munemori and the Taira clan take the young Emperor Antoku and the three sacred treasures 2000 ( MM) was a Leap year that started on Saturday of the Common Era, in accordance with the Gregorian calendar. Events 326 - The old St Peter's Basilica is consecrated 1302 - Pope Boniface VIII issues the Papal bull Year 2001 ( MMI) was a Common year starting on Monday according to the Gregorian calendar. Events 1800 - War of the Second Coalition: Battle of Hohenlinden, French Year 2003 ( MMIII) was a Common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar.

From January 2006 the Open Directory began to publish online reports to inform the public about the development of the project. The first report covered the year 2005. Monthly reports have been issued subsequently.

These reports give greater insight into the functioning of the directory than the simplified statistics given on the front page of the directory. The number of listings and categories cited on the front page include "Test" and "Bookmarks" categories, but these are not included in the RDF dump offered to users. The total number of editors who have contributed to the directory as of March 31, 2007 was 75,151. Events 307 - After divorcing his wife Minervina, Constantine marries Fausta, the daughter of the retired Roman Emperor Year 2007 ( MMVII) was a Common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar in the 21st century. ^[2] The number of active editors at any instant is much lower; for example, there were 7407 active editors during August 2006. ^[3]

System failure and editing outage, October to December 2006

On October 20, 2006, the ODP's main server suffered a catastrophic system failure^[4] that prevented editors from working on the directory until December 18, 2006. Events 1740 - Maria Theresa takes the throne of Austria. France, Prussia, Bavaria and Saxony Year 2006 ( MMVI) was a Common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. Events 218 BC - Second Punic War: Battle of the Trebia - Hannibal 's Carthaginian forces defeat those of the Year 2006 ( MMVI) was a Common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ^[5] 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. Events 532 - Nika riots in Constantinople. 888 - Odo Count of Paris becomes King of the Franks Year 2007 ( MMVII) was a Common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar in the 21st century. ^[6] On January 26, 2007, weekly publication of RDF dumps resumed. Events 1340 - King Edward III of England is declared King of France. Year 2007 ( MMVII) was a Common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar in the 21st century. To avoid future outages, the system now resides on a redundant configuration of two Intel-based servers. ^[7]

Competing and spinoff projects

ODP inspired the formation of two other major web directories edited by volunteers and sponsored by public companies, both now defunct: Go.com directory (formerly owned by The Walt Disney Company), and Zeal (formerly owned by LookSmart). A web directory or link directory is a directory on the World Wide Web. A volunteer is someone who works for a community or for the benefit of environment primarily because they choose to do so A public company usually refers to a company that is permitted to offer its registered securities ( Stock, bonds, etc Gocom (also known as The Go Network) is a Web portal first launched by Jeff Gold and now operated by the Walt Disney Internet Group, which is a part of Zeal was a volunteer-built Web directory, first appearing in 1999 and then acquired by LookSmart in October 2000 for $20 million LookSmart ( is an online advertising and technology company headquartered in San Francisco, California. These directories did not license their content for open content distribution, which may have contributed to their demise; open content licensing contributed to ODP's success in a fiercely competitive market. Open content, a Neologism coined by analogy with " Open source " describes any kind of Creative work published in a format that explicitly allows

The concept of using a large-scale community of editors to compile online content has been successfully applied to other types of projects. ODP's editing model directly inspired three other open content volunteer projects: an open content restaurant directory known as ChefMoz (launched by ODP management), an open content music directory known as MusicMoz, and an encyclopedia known as Open Site. Chef Moz is an offshoot of the Open Directory Project (ODP is an English Open content directory of World Wide Web links of restaurants the Open-Site, the Open Encyclopedia Project, is a free Internet Encyclopedia founded in 2002 by Michael J As yet, none of these has approached ODP's level of success.

Content

Open Directory Project front page, January 2006

Gnuhoo borrowed the basic outline for its initial ontology from Usenet. Usenet, a Portmanteau of "user" and "network" is a world-wide distributed Internet discussion system In 1998, Rich Skrenta said, "I took a long list of groups and hand-edited them into a hierarchy. "^[8] 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, and Sports. While these fifteen 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 has been reached.

In July 1998, the directory became multilingual 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 has 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 ODP 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 ODP as two parallel directories: Regional and Topical.

On November 14, 2000, a special directory within the Open Directory was created for people under 18 years of age. Events 1533 - Conquistadors from Spain under the leadership of Francisco Pizarro arrive in Cajamarca, Inca 2000 ( MM) was a Leap year that started on Saturday of the Common Era, in accordance with the Gregorian calendar. ^[9] Key factors distinguishing this "Kids and Teens" area [1] 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. [2];
• category names as well as site descriptions use vocabulary which is age appropriate;
• 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 the Open Directory.

By May 2005, this portion of the Open Directory included over 32,000 site listings.

Since early 2004, the whole site has been in UTF-8 encoding. UTF-8 (8- Bit UCS / Unicode Transformation Format) is a variable-length Character encoding for Unicode. Prior to this, the encoding used to be ISO 8859-1 for English language categories, and a language-dependent character set for other languages. ISO 8859-1, more formally cited as ISO/IEC 8859-1 is part 1 of ISO/IEC 8859, a standard Character encoding of the Latin alphabet. The RDF dumps have been encoded in UTF-8 since early 2000.

Maintenance

Directory listings are maintained by editors. While some editors focus on the addition of new listings, others focus on maintaining the existing listings. This includes 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 go through site submissions to remove spam and duplicate submissions.

Robozilla is a Web crawler written to check the status of all sites listed in ODP. prod concern = no claims of [[WPN notability]] single self-published source month = October day = 9 year = 2008 time = 1650 timestamp = 20081009165045 A web crawler (also known as a web spider, web robot, or—especially in the FOAF community— web scutter) is a program or automated Periodically, Robozilla will flag sites which appear to have moved or disappeared, and editors follow up to check the sites and take action. This process is critical for the directory in striving to achieve one of its founding goals: to reduce the link rot in web directories. Link rot (or linkrot) is the process by which links on a Website gradually become irrelevant or broken as time goes on because websites that they link A web directory or link directory is a directory on the World Wide Web. Shortly after each run, the sites marked with errors are automatically moved to the unreviewed queue where editors may investigate them when time permits.

Due to the popularity of the Open Directory and its resulting impact on search engine rankings (See PageRank), domains with lapsed registration that are listed on ODP have attracted domain hijacking, an issue that has been addressed by regularly removing expired domains from the directory. PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a Hyperlinked set of documents such as the World Wide Web, Domain hijacking is the process by which internet Domain names are stolen from the rightful registrant

While corporate funding and staff for the ODP have diminished in recent years, volunteerism has resulted in the creation of new and improved editing tools, such as linkcheckers to supplement Robozilla, category crawlers, spellcheckers, search tools that directly sift a recent RDF dump, bookmarklets to help automate some editing functions, and tools to help work through unreviewed queues in multiple ways. A bookmarklet is an Applet, a small computer application stored as the URL of a bookmark in a Web browser or as a Hyperlink on a

License and requirements

ODP data is made available for open content distribution under the terms of the Open Directory License, which requires a specific ODP attribution table on every Web page that uses the data. The Open Directory License is a License used by the Open Directory Project for its content

The Open Directory License also includes a requirement that users of the data continually check the ODP 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 to refer to the Open Directory License 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. The Free Software Foundation ( FSF) is a Non-profit corporation founded by Richard Stallman on 4 October 1985 to support the Free software movement

RDF dumps

ODP data is made available through an RDF-like dump that is published on a dedicated download server [3]. The Resource Description Framework (RDF is a family of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C Specifications originally designed as a Metadata Data An archive of previous versions is also available [4]. New versions are usually generated weekly. An ODP editor has catalogued a number of bugs that are/were encountered when implementing the ODP RDF dump, including UTF-8 encoding errors (fixed since August 2004) and an RDF format that does not comply with the final RDF specification because ODP RDF generation was implemented before the RDF specification was finalized [5]. UTF-8 (8- Bit UCS / Unicode Transformation Format) is a variable-length Character encoding for Unicode.

So while today the so-called RDF dump is valid XML, it is not strictly RDF, but an ODP-specific format. Don't change "Extensible" Software to process the ODP RDF dump needs to take account of this.

Content users

ODP data powers the core directory services for many of the Web's largest search engines and portals, including Netscape Search, AOL Search, Google, and Alexa. In software engineering a directory is similar to a dictionary it enables the look up of a name and information associated with that name Netscape Communications (formerly known as Netscape Communications Corporation and commonly known as Netscape) is an American computer services company Google Inc is an American public corporation, earning revenue from advertising related to its Internet search, e-mail, online Alexa Internet Inc is a California -based Subsidiary company of Amazon

Other uses are also made of ODP data. For example, in the spring of 2004 Overture announced a search service for third parties combining Yahoo! Directory search results with ODP titles, descriptions and category metadata. Yahoo! Search Marketing is a keyword-based " Pay per click " or " Sponsored search " Internet advertising service provided by Yahoo!. The Yahoo! Directory is a Web directory which rivals the Open Directory Project in size The search engine Gigablast announced on 12 May 2005 its searchable copy of the Open Directory. Events 1191 - Richard I of England marries Berengaria of Navarre. Year 2005 ( MMV) was a Common year starting on Saturday (link displays full calendar of the Gregorian calendar. The technology permits search of websites listed in specific categories, "in effect, instantly creating over 500,000 vertical search engines". [6]

As of September 8, 2006, the ODP listed 313 English-language Web sites that use ODP data as well as 238 sites in other languages. Events 70 - Roman forces under Titus sack Jerusalem. 1264 - The Statute of Kalisz Year 2006 ( MMVI) was a Common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. [7] However, these figures do not reflect the full picture of use, as those sites that use ODP data without following the terms of the ODP license are not listed.

Policies and procedures

There are restrictions imposed on who can become an ODP 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 ODP 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, which can result in certain areas going without editors for long periods of time.

ODP's editing model is a hierarchical 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 in a category elsewhere in the directory. Mentorship relationships between editors are encouraged, and internal forums provide a vehicle for new editors to ask questions.

ODP has its own internal forums, the contents of which are intended only for editors to communicate with each other^[10] primarily about editing topics. Access to the forums requires an editor account, and editors are expected to keep the contents of these forums private. ^[11]

Over time, senior editors may be granted additional privileges which reflect their editing experience and leadership within the editing community. The most straightforward are editall 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 editall, 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, authorities that had previously only been available to root (staff) editors. ^[12] A full list of senior editors is available to the public. ^[13]

All ODP editors are expected to abide by ODP's Editing Guidelines. [8] These guidelines describe editing basics: what 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. ODP Guidelines are periodically revised after discussion in editor forums.

Site submissions

One of the original motivations for forming Gnuhoo/Newhoo/ODP was the frustration that many people experienced in getting their sites listed on Yahoo! Directory. The Yahoo! Directory is a Web directory which rivals the Open Directory Project in size However Yahoo! has since implemented a paid service for timely consideration of site submissions. That lead has been followed by many other directories. Some accept no free submission at all. By contrast the ODP has maintained its policy of free site submissions for all types of site — the only one of the major general directories to do so.

One result has been a gradual divergence between the ODP and other directories in the balance of content. The pay-for-inclusion model favours those able and willing to pay, so commercial sites tend to predominate in directories using it. (See for example the initial impact on Looksmart. [9]) Conversely, a directory manned by volunteers will reflect the aims and interests of those volunteers. The ODP lists a high proportion of informational and non-profit sites.

Another consequence of the free submission policy is that the ODP has enormous numbers of submissions. The ODP now has approximately two million unreviewed submissions, in large part due to spam and incorrectly submitted sites. So the average processing time for a site submission has grown longer with each passing year. However the time taken cannot be predicted, since the variation is so great: a submission might be processed within hours or take several years.

Controversy and criticism

There have long been allegations that volunteer ODP 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, ODP 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. ^[14] Other alleged abuses have occurred at the executive level, with company management leveraging the link value from ODP to accelerate new privately funded projects. Although site policies suggest that an individual site should be submitted to only one category,^[15] as of October 2007, Topix. com, a news aggregation site operated by ODP founder Rich Skrenta, has more than 10,000 listings. ^[16]

Early in the history of the ODP, its staff gave representatives of selected websites, such as Rolling Stone magazine, editing access at ODP in order to list many individual pages from those websites. Rolling Stone is a United States -based Magazine devoted to Music, Politics, and Popular culture that is published The use of such professional content providers lapsed and the experiment has not been repeated.

Ownership and management

Underlying some controversy surrounding ODP is its ownership and management. Many of the original GnuHoo volunteers felt that they had been deceived into joining a commercial enterprise. Most of that controversy died down when the project was renamed NewHoo. Moreover, when Netscape (whose parent company is AOL) acquired the project, renamed it ODP, and released ODP's content under an open content license, criticism of the ODP all but disappeared. Netscape Communications (formerly known as Netscape Communications Corporation and commonly known as Netscape) is an American computer services company However, as ODP's content became widely used by most major search engines and web directories, the issue of ODP's ownership and management resurfaced. A web directory or link directory is a directory on the World Wide Web.

At ODP's inception, there was little thought given to the idea of how ODP should be managed, and there were no official forums, guidelines, or FAQs. FAQ is an Acronym for " Frequently Asked Question(s " In essence, ODP began as a free for all. Even after ODP set up its internal editor forums, many editors remained blissfully unaware that these forums existed until they were directed to the forums by one of their fellow editors. Moreover, given that ODP had no official guidelines at first, ODP editors simply hashed out some sort of consensus among themselves and published unofficial FAQs.

As time went on, the ODP Editor Forums became the de facto ODP parliament, and when one of ODP's staff members would post an opinion in the forums, it would be considered an official ruling. (In other words, "Staff has spoken. ") There was also a short-lived attempt at moderation of the ODP Editor Forums, but it was abandoned as being the antithesis of the egalitarian principles on which the ODP community was supposed to be based. Antithesis ( Greek for "setting opposite" from against + position) is a counter- Propositions and denotes a direct Contrast Egalitarianism (derived from the French word égal, meaning equal) is a political doctrine that holds that all people should be treated as equals and have Even so, ODP 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 ODP editors, with ODP's paid staff having the final say regarding ODP's policies and procedures.

Allegations that editors are removed for criticizing policies

ODP's paid staff has imposed controversial policies from time to time, and volunteer editors who dissent in ways staff considers uncivil may find their editing privileges removed. One alleged example of this was chronicled at the XODP Yahoo! eGroup in May of 2000. ^[17] The earliest known exposé was Life After the Open Directory Project, later appearing as a June 1, 2000, guest column written for Traffick. Events 193 - Roman Emperor Didius Julianus is Assassinated 987 - Hugh Capet is elected 2000 ( MM) was a Leap year that started on Saturday of the Common Era, in accordance with the Gregorian calendar. com,^[18] by David F. Prenatt, Jr. (former ODP editor "netesq") after losing his ODP editing privileges. Another example was the volunteer editor known by the alias The Cunctator, who was banned from the ODP soon after submitting an article to Slashdot on October 24, 2000, which criticized changes in ODP's copyright policies. Events 69 - Second Battle of Bedriacum, forces under Antonius Primus the commander of the Danube armies loyal to Vespasian, defeat 2000 ( MM) was a Leap year that started on Saturday of the Common Era, in accordance with the Gregorian calendar. Copyright is a legal concept enacted by Governments, giving the creator of an original work of authorship Exclusive rights to control its distribution usually for ^[19]}

Uninhibited discussion of ODP's purported shortcomings has become more common on mainstream Webmaster discussion forums.

Editor removal procedures

ODP's editor removal procedures are overseen by ODP's staff and meta editors. According to ODP'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 ODP's staff and meta editors, and volunteer editors who are being discussed are not given notice that such proceedings are taking place. ^[20] 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, ODP meta editor Arlarson states that "a great deal of confusion about the removal of editors from ODP results from false or misleading statements by former editors". ^[21]

ODP has a standing policy that prohibits any current ODP editors in a position to know anything from discussing the reasons for specific editor removals. In the past, this has led to claims that many ODP editors are left to wonder why they cannot login at ODP to perform their editing work.

However, ODP is now set up in such a way that when someone attempts to login at ODP using a deactivated editor login, a generic web page is displayed that informs a removed editor that a final decision has been made regarding the deactivation of his or her login and providing a list of possible reasons as to why such a decision might have been made.

Blacklisting allegations

Senior ODP 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.

Software

Search

The ODPSearch software is a derivative version of Isearch and is open source, licensed under the Mozilla Public License. Isearch is open-source Text retrieval software first developed in 1994 as part of the Isite Z39 Open source is a development methodology which offers practical accessibility to a product's source (goods and knowledge The Mozilla Public License (MPL is a free and Open source Software license.

Editor Forums

The ODP Editor Forums were originally run on software that was based on the proprietary Ultimate Bulletin Board system. UBBclassic (formerly Ultimate Bulletin Board or UBB) is an Internet forum software package originally written by Ted O'Neil of Groupee Inc In June 2003, they switched to the open source phpBB system. phpBB is a popular Internet forum package written in the PHP programming language As of 2007, these forums are powered by a modified version of phpBB.

Bug tracking

The bug tracking software used by the ODP is Bugzilla, and the web server Apache. Bugzilla is a Web -based general-purpose Bugtracker tool originally developed and used by the Mozilla project and licensed under the Squid web proxy server was also used but it was removed in August 2007 when the storage servers were reorganized. Squid is a Proxy server and Web cache daemon. It has a wide variety of uses from speeding up a Web server by caching repeated requests All these applications are open source.

Closed source

However, the ODP database/editing software is closed source, although Richard Skrenta of ODP did say in June 1998 that he was considering licensing it under the GNU General Public License. This has led to criticism from the aforementioned GNU project and other proponents of free software, many of whom also criticise the ODP content license. Free software or software libre is Software that can be used studied and modified without restriction and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified ^[22]

As such, there have been some efforts to provide alternatives to ODP. These alternatives would allow communities of like-minded editors to set up and maintain their own open source/open content Web directories. However, no significant open source/open content alternative to ODP has emerged.

Hierarchical structure

Recently criticism of ODP's hierarchical structure emerged. @@@ main@@@ - title Hierarchy@@@ keywords structure; sociology; information@@@ review@@@ - Many believe hierarchical directories are too complicated. As the recent emergence of Web 2.0, folksonomies began to appear. Web 20 is a term describing changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and Web design that aims to enhance Creativity, secure Folksonomy (also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging) is the practice and method These people thought folksonomies, networks, and directed graph are more "natural" and easier to manage than hierarchies. In Graph theory, a network is a digraph with weighted edges These networks have become an especially useful concept in analysing the interaction between Biology In Mathematics and Computer science, a graph is the basic object of study in Graph theory. ^[23][24][25]

See also

• List of web directories
• Open Site

References

External links

• The Open Directory Project
• Official DMOZ staff blog
• Open Directory Project public forum
• History of the Open Directory Project (article from 1999)
• Dummies Guide to dmoz.org
• Open Directory Project at the Open Directory Project