Cindy-

I think there are several options for how this works, and different applications may take different approaches.  The most basic approach would be to just include the URIs in your local system and retrieve them any time you wanted to work with them.  But the performance of that would be terrible, and your application would stop working if it couldn't retrieve the URIs.

So there are lots of different approaches (which could be combined):

- Retrieve the URIs the first time, and then cache them locally.
- Download an entire data dump of the remote vocabulary and host it locally.
- Add text fields in parallel to the URIs, so you at least have a label for it.
- Index the data in Solr, Elasticsearch, etc. and use that most of the time, esp. for read-only operations.

-Esme

> On 02/25/15, at 2:30 PM, Harper, Cynthia <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> Well, that's my question.  I have the micro view of linked data, I think - it's a distribution/self-describing format. But I don't see the big picture.
> 
> In the non-techie library world, linked data is being talked about (perhaps only in listserv traffic) as if the data (bibliographic data, for instance) will reside on remote sites (as a SPARQL endpoint??? We don't know the technical implications of that), and be displayed by <your local catalog/the centralized inter-national catalog> by calling data from that remote site. But the original question was how the data on those remote sites would be <access points> - how can I start my search by searching for that remote content?  I assume there has to be a database implementation that visits that data and pre-indexes it for it to be searchable, and therefore the index has to be local (or global a la Google or OCLC or its bibliographic-linked-data equivalent). 
> 
> All of the above parenthesized or bracketed concepts are nebulous to me.
> 
> Cindy
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Sarah Weissman
> Sent: Tuesday, February 24, 2015 11:02 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] linked data question
> 
>> I think Code4libbers will know more about my question about 
>> distributed INDEXES?  This is my rudimentary knowledge of linked data 
>> - that the indexing process will have to transit the links, and build 
>> a local index to the data, even if in displaying the individual 
>> "records", it goes again out to the source.  But are there examples of 
>> distributed systems that have distributed INDEXES?  Or Am I wrong in 
>> envisioning an index as a separate entity from the data in today's technology?
>> 
>> 
> I'm a little confused by what you mean by distributed index in a linked data context. I assume an index would have to be database implementation specific, while data is typically exposed for external consumption via implementation-agnostic protocols/formats, like a SPARQL endpoint or a REST API. How do you locally index something remote under these constraints?
> 
> -Sarah
> 
> 
> 
>> Cindy Harper
>> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Harper, Cynthia
>> Sent: Tuesday, February 24, 2015 1:20 PM
>> To: [log in to unmask]; 'Williams, Ann'
>> Subject: RE: linked data question
>> 
>> What I haven't read, but what I have wondered about, is whether so 
>> far, linked DATA is distributed, but the INDEXES are local?  Is there 
>> any example of a system with distributed INDEXES?
>> 
>> Cindy Harper
>> [log in to unmask]
>> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: AUTOCAT [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Williams, 
>> Ann
>> Sent: Tuesday, February 24, 2015 10:26 AM
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: [ACAT] linked data question
>> 
>> I was just wondering how linked data will affect OPAC searching and 
>> discovery vs. a record with text approach. For example, we have 
>> various 856 links to publisher, summary and biographical information 
>> in our OPAC as well as ISBNs linking to ContentCafe. But none of that 
>> content is discoverable in the OPAC and it requires a further click on 
>> the part of patrons (many of whom won't click).
>> 
>> Ann Williams
>> USJ
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