[Edu-sig] Rich Data Structures plus Knowledge Domain Object Sets

[Dethe Elza]

> We also plan to branch out into rich data *reprocessing* i.e.
> downloading publicly available data and bundling it up in rich data
> structures (Ruby's or Perl's, as easily as Python's).  This group
> undertaking is for inhouse development mostly, not for retail pricing
> (let others rush to shrink wrap).

For rich data structures, you might want to look at JSON.  The
structures are suitable for reading directly with Javascript and
Python (being a subset of those languages' notations for dicts and
lists), but there are libraries for reading it in Perl, Java, C, etc.
Super-simple to use and extremely portable.  XML is also an option,
but lots of people are XML averse these days.  The two biggest wins
with XML are that it uses unicode and provides structure, and JSON
(which I believe is specified as UTF-8 encoded unicode) gives you both
of those without all the other baggage XML brings with it.

http://json.org/

--Dethe