We show that the universal physics of recent holographic non-Fermi liquid
models is captured by a semi-holographic description, in which a dynamical
boundary field is coupled to a strongly coupled conformal sector having a
gravity dual. This allows various generalizations, such as a dynamical exponent
and lattice and impurity effects. We examine possible relevant deformations,
including multi-trace terms and spin-orbit effects. We discuss the matching
onto the UV theory of the earlier work, and an alternate description in which
the boundary field is integrated out.Comment: 26 pages, 4 figures; v2: typos corrected and report number adde
