DMOZ

DMOZ (from directory.mozilla.org, an earlier domain name) is a multilingual open-content directory of World Wide Web links. The site and community who maintain it are also known as the Open Directory Project (ODP). It is owned by AOL but constructed and maintained by a community of volunteer editors.

DMOZ uses a hierarchical ontology scheme for organizing site listings. Listings on a similar topic are grouped into categories which can then include smaller categories.

Project information

DMOZ was founded in the United States as Gnuhoo by Rich Skrenta and Bob Truel in 1998 while they were both working as engineers for Sun Microsystems. 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, an ancestor of tin, the popular threaded Usenet newsreader for Unix systems. The original category structure of the Gnuhoo directory was based loosely on the structure of Usenet newsgroups then in existence.