What are best practices for preventing problems in cases like this when an
important Linked Data service may go offline?

--- originally this was a reply to Jodi which she suggested to post on the
list too ---

A safe [pessimistic?] approach would be to say "we don't trust [reliability
of] linked data on the Web as services can and will go down" and to cache
everything.

In that case you'd want to create a caching service that would keep updated
copies of all important Linked Data sources and a fall-back strategy for
switching to this caching service when needed. Like archive.org for Linked
Data.

Some semantic web search engines might already have subsets of Linked Data
web cached, but not sure how much they cover (e.g., if they have all of LoC
data, up-to-date).

If one were to create such a service how to best update it, considering
you'd be requesting *all* Linked Data URIs from each source? An efficient
approach would be to regularly load RDF dumps for every major source if
available (e.g., LoC says - here's a full dump of all our RDF data ... and
a .torrent too).

What do you think?

Uldis


On 29 September 2013 12:33, Jodi Schneider <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Any best practices for caching authorities/vocabs to suggest for this
> thread on the Code4Lib list?
>
> Linked Data authorities & vocabularies at Library of Congress (id.loc.gov)
> are going to be affected by the website shutdown -- because of lack of
> government funds.
>
> -Jodi
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: David Riordan <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Sat, Sep 28, 2013 at 3:08 PM
> Subject: [CODE4LIB] HEADS UP - Government shutdown will mean *.loc.gov is
> going offline October 1
> To: [log in to unmask]
>
>
>
> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/09/library-of-congress-says-it-will-take-its-site-offline-if-govt-shuts-down/
>
> This morning's latest terrifying news on the government shutdown front is
> that unless Congress decides to (ahahahahahah) oh who am I kidding.
>
> Broadcast message from root October 1, 2013 00:00
> The system is going down for system halt NOW!
>
> Since the Library of Congress' web services are you know, won't have money,
> they'll be taken offline along with the rest of LC. Compared to most of the
> things that'll happen, this won't be so bad. However it could make a lot of
> people on this list's lives a living hell on Tuesday morning when we start
> getting system failures because an API relied on a lookup to id.loc.gov or
> any other LC service.
>
> So brace your bosses and patrons. Because without loc.gov, things could
> get
> weird.
>
> Seriously, if anyone knows more, please share.
>
> David Riordan | Product Manager, NYPL Labs |
> @NYPL_Labs<http://twitter.com/nypl_labs>
> [log in to unmask] | m 203.521.1222 | @riordan<
> http://twitter.com/riordan>
>
>