MERO was composed by the Finnish Maritime Administration and the Semantic Computing Research Group SeCo as a part of the FinnONTO project (2003–2012). The Finnish Transport Agency and the Finnish Terminology Centre TSK launched a project to update MERO in 2016. During the project some 1 200 concepts related to road traffic were added in the ontology. The new LIIKO ontology, which was published in October 2018, contains mainly terms in Finnish.