Taxonomies can be imported from external service providers and locations.
A few samples are built-in to this distribution, and more can be provided by additional modules. Most supported services are direct URL requests, usually with an identifier in the GET string indicating the entry being requested. Others are simply URLs (no ID argument needed) where a third-party document can be downloaded from, provided as a convenience, or to avoid licensing problems, and to ensure you are retrieving the latest version.
A lookup may be a simple URI request which returns an all-in-one resource, eg an RDF/XML or CSV file containing all the terms at once. This is the easiest method of distribution.
For larger vocabularies, a recursive spidering option is enabled. Queries can be made using URI strings (REST). Two forms of 'service' are currently supported - search and lookup. Both services are expected to return some form of unique identifer that can be used to locate further terms. A search result will return one or more ids that can be retrieved by lookup. A lookup may return a term definition that includes reference to its parent or child terms. These are usually looked up next.
Search is intended to take a text string and return a resource ID relevant to the service provider. Each service has its own form of local ID. It is the job of the service to identify the ID from the result and create an appropriate lookup request using that ID as a key.
Lookup is used when you have uniquely identified the resource entry to be retrieved, and returns a machine-readable dump of that data in one of the supported formats. Often that result will contain references to further resources that can be retrieved in turn.
When requesting remote URIs, this client will attempt to use
Content Negotiation to tell the server that it Accepts
and prefers application/rdf+xml as a response.
If the server supports this and complies,
then subsequent parsing will be much easier.
Such services are currently rare, but
The Library of Congress Subject Headings search
is one such resource!
The service definition array is undergoing development.