It's been a quiet month at the new restaurant directory, punctuated by a couple of developments. A portion of the US restaurant data has now gone live in a beta version on Netscape. You'll find it under Home > Decision Guides > Restaurants and it's called Restaurant Match. It has search, compare and progressive selection functions and should soon show more data.

There has been a nice flurry of new editor applications, both from Dmoz and from the public side. Autumn, ChefMoz staff programmer extraordinaire, has recently set up an automated signup function for existing Dmoz editors. You now simply click the same "become an editor" link anywhere on a city or state page, fill in your editor name and check the "already a Dmoz editor" box. A few moments later, an e-mail arrives, letting you know that you can now log on with a password.

The next step is to apply for a city that you live in or know well. Applications for anything other than one city level cat are not usually appropriate, although exceptions may be made in countries that still have few listings and editors.

Forum Activity

 In the very early stages of this directory, editors tried to hammer out the ground rules for what was an acceptable listing. No one really felt like excluding non-restaurant establishments, like delicatessens with take-out or other food outlets without seating. The rule editors agreed on was simply that the focus of ChefMoz was to list restaurants, but that any business that served ready to eat food could be listed, as long as it was properly described. The underlying idea was to be more inclusive rather than less; allowing the users to find alternate places to get a meal as well as the traditional ones.

That was fine until the reality of the first listings of grocery stores with take-out sections hit. How to reconcile Lake Country Grocers living next to La Bella, a high end dining spot? It certainly looks out of place, and can easily be confusing to someone who's browsing the directory looking for a good dinner spot.

What's the solution? Short answer: we don't know yet. In the fora, there are discussions about ways of marking these non-restaurant entries with a selection box, so that a user could tell by glancing at a listing what kind of place it was. It should also be possible to exclude these from searches, perhaps even by default.

If you would like to contribute to this or other discussions about the nature of the directory, consider joining up - it's easy. If you're more interested in editing, describing and reviewing restaurants, that's more that welcome too, of course. Much help is still needed in all areas of the directory; be it in adding new listings or tending the existing ones. Please see above for sign-up details. 

The directory data has now also been made available in RDF format. Please see the link on the ChefMoz front page - http://dmoz.org.