The document discusses locally decodable codes, which allow recovery of individual data symbols from a coded data set even after erasures. Reed-Muller codes and multiplicity codes were early constructions that provided locality but only up to a rate of 0.5. Matching vector codes were later introduced and can achieve locality r for codes of positive rate and length n=O(r^2). However, the optimal tradeoff between rate, length, and locality remains an open problem.