You're quite right, of course-- I was trying to talk about an architecture "guided" by the Web (really, having learnt the lessons of the Web's success), but I wasn't very clear. A cache of metadata, it seems to me, might participate in the Web, in which role it should, as you say, return just what was retrieved, and also in other architectures, in other roles.

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A. Soroka
The University of Virginia Library

On Jun 29, 2014, at 3:21 PM, Simon Spero <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>> We will need to be guided by the Web architecture and use a design with caching. If you cache remote linked data resources locally (and if you intend to give your patrons a reasonable experience, you will be caching) you can certainly make emendations into or out of the cache, processing data in whatever ways you see fit. 
> [Small but important point:  Web caches aren’t supposed to monkey about with the contents of documents they are caching - see http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec13.html#sec13.1.1]