Oedipus is a tool for maintaining hierarchical links, inspired by the Open Directory Project (ODP). The ODP is a collective effort to create an index of useful Web resources. Several thousand volunteer editors, each with an interest in their chosen topic, maintain their respective categories, producing a Web guide that's much more up-to-date and higher quality than Yahoo.

As part of the ODP's open nature, the data making up the index is available under a liberal licence; read the dmoz.org licence for the details. The data format is a pseudo-XML format vaguely based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF).

The data comes in two files, which are called the content and structure files; the full files are around 400Mb and 75Mb of XML data, respectively. The structure file lists the topics ('Business', 'Computers/Programming/Languages/Python', etc.) and how they're nested and interlinked, while the content file lists the Web pages under each topic, including URL, title, and brief description.

Consult the ODP category Computers: Internet: WWW: Searching the Web: Directories: Open Directory Project for information about the RDF dumps, and for pointers to Web sites that make use of the data.

• ODP slides from my talk at the August 31, 1999 DCPIGgies meeting.