Collecting Rich Data Structures for students

[kirby.urner at gmail.com]

Greetings Pythoneers --

Some of us over on edu-sig, one of the community actives,
have been brainstorming around this Rich Data Structures
idea, by which we mean Python data structures already
populated with non-trivial data about various topics such
as:  periodic table (proton, neutron counts); Monty Python
skit titles; some set of cities (lat, long coordinates); types
of sushi.

Obviously some of these require levels of nesting, say
lists within dictionaries, more depth of required.

Our motivation in collecting these repositories is to give
students of Python more immediate access to meaningful
data, not just meaningful programs.  Sometimes all it takes
to win converts, to computers in general, is to demonstrate
their capacity to handle gobs of data adroitly.  Too often,
a textbook will only provide trivial examples, which in the
print medium is all that makes sense.

Some have offered XML repositories, which I can well
understand, but in this case we're looking specifically for
legal Python modules (py files), although they don't have
to be Latin-1 (e.g. the sushi types file might not have a
lot of romanji).

If you have any examples you'd like to email me about,
kirby.urner at gmail.com is a good address.

Here's my little contribution to the mix:
http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/python/gis.py

Kirby Urner
4D Solutions
Silicon Forest
Oregon