The movie ontology MO aims to provide a controlled vocabulary to semantically describe movie related concepts such as Movie, Genre, Director, Actor and individuals such as “Ice Age”, “Drama”, “Steven Spielberg” or “Johnny Depp”. The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is used to specify the MO ontology. Several other ontologies that are provided in the Linked Data cloud are considered and integrated to highly couple the MO ontology with the Linked Data cloud to take advantage of synergy effects.

The movie ontology MO was motivated by the fact that most movie ontologies mainly focuses on concepts and the semantic relations among those concepts. In addition, existing movie ontologies define individuals or instances of a concept superficially. We think that a semantic movie ontology should provide on one hand concept hierarchies (e.g. for movie categorization and navigation purposes) and a sufficient set of individuals that can be used to describe movies. This enables user-friendly presentation of movie descriptions in the appropriate detail and the ability to describe movies taking advantage of the rich selection of the controlled vocabulary in MO. Therefore, we attempt to provide amongst other things in-depth concepts and individuals especially for genre types.

MO is currently developed, adapted and maintained by the Department of Informatics at the University of Zurich.