An orthogonal representation of a graph $G$ over a field $\mathbb{F}$ is an assignment of a vector $u_v \in \mathbb{F}^t$ to every vertex $v$ of $G$, such that $\langle u_v,u_v \rangle \neq 0$ for every vertex $v$ and $\langle u_v,u_{v'} \rangle = 0$ whenever $v$ and $v'$ are adjacent in $G$. The locality of the orthogonal representation is the largest dimension of a subspace spanned by the vectors associated with a closed neighborhood in the graph. We introduce a novel graph parameter, called the local orthogonality dimension, defined for a given graph $G$ and a given field $\mathbb{F}$, as the smallest possible locality of an orthogonal representation of $G$ over $\mathbb{F}$. We investigate the usefulness of topological methods for proving lower bounds on the local orthogonality dimension. We prove that graphs for which topological methods imply a lower bound of $t$ on their chromatic number have local orthogonality dimension at least $\lceil t/2 \rceil +1$ over every field, strengthening a result of Simonyi and Tardos on the local chromatic number. We show that for certain graphs this lower bound is tight, whereas for others, the local orthogonality dimension over the reals is equal to the chromatic number. More generally, we prove that for every complement of a line graph, the local orthogonality dimension over $\mathbb{R}$ coincides with the chromatic number. This strengthens a recent result by Daneshpajouh, Meunier, and Mizrahi, who proved that the local and standard chromatic numbers of these graphs are equal. As another extension of their result, we prove that the local and standard chromatic numbers are equal for some additional graphs, from the family of Kneser graphs. We also show an $\mathsf{NP}$-hardness result for the local orthogonality dimension and present an application of this graph parameter to the index coding problem from information theory.