Catagory heirarchy

[samiam]

"When DMOZ was started, there were 0 sites. There are many ways to organize this type of data. Staff came up with an initial structure to begin with. I do not know what it was based on, but you've got to start somewhere."

 

It was based on the structure of Usenet.

from this article comes a quote from Rich Skrenta, one of the founders of the directory:

"We toyed with the Dewey Decimal System, but it didn't really seem to fit well with the content on the web. Eventually we hit on the idea of using a list of Usenet groups as an outline for our category structure. That would provide representative breadth for what people talked about on the Internet. I took a long list of groups and hand-edited them into a hierarchy,"

 

Some more history can be found in the articles under this category.

 

-sam