It's funny, this brings IMDB almost full-circle to its origins.
Back in the early 90s it was first this huge text file distributed via usenet and ftp. I remember contributing a few points of a trivia about T2: Judgement Day, one being the mirror of Arnold's "Get out." line to the trucker in Terminator to Robert Patrick delivering the same to the helicopter pilot in T2.
Later on, after the volume of data was becoming unwieldy for a flat text file, it was converted to a MS-DOS based database system. You'd download a ton of archive files, unpack them, then run a binary that would allow you to query things like title, year, actor. One of the best features from those days (and maybe the very early web-based IMDB) was you could say, "show me actors that were common to these 2 movies" (or maybe it was "given these 2 actors, show me movies they both starred in" -- or maybe both).
I sorely miss those days of a community-driven IMDB. I was truly saddened when it "sold out" and became a more-or-less commercial portal.
Unfortunately, the data has a restrictive license. Though, I'm not sure if that entirely holds, as I believe there are limitations (at least in the United States) to having copyright on compilations of factual data.
IMDB still has a common cast search feature, offering both "show me the actors common to these two movies" and "show me the movies common to these two actors":
For some of this stuff you can use Freebase, which has an awesome queryable JSON API and a very open and permissive license. Our movie data is quite good for structured information, though not so much for unstructured trivia. [Disclosure, I work on Freebase for Google.]
Back in the early 90s it was first this huge text file distributed via usenet and ftp. I remember contributing a few points of a trivia about T2: Judgement Day, one being the mirror of Arnold's "Get out." line to the trucker in Terminator to Robert Patrick delivering the same to the helicopter pilot in T2.
Later on, after the volume of data was becoming unwieldy for a flat text file, it was converted to a MS-DOS based database system. You'd download a ton of archive files, unpack them, then run a binary that would allow you to query things like title, year, actor. One of the best features from those days (and maybe the very early web-based IMDB) was you could say, "show me actors that were common to these 2 movies" (or maybe it was "given these 2 actors, show me movies they both starred in" -- or maybe both).
I sorely miss those days of a community-driven IMDB. I was truly saddened when it "sold out" and became a more-or-less commercial portal.