Dethe Elza's dashboard

One more suggestion is that you have an open web interface, such as GData provides. I suggest basing it on the Atom Publichsing Protocol, as it is a very well-thought out way to expose data on the web (and GData builds on it as well). This way it will be possible (and convenient) to write libraries for various programming languages to pull data from the site. I would even be willing to help with a version of such a library for Python. For an example of a language which incorporates rich data sets very well, see Frink (http://futureboy.homeip.net/frinkdocs/)

The Python Edu-Sig had a thread awhile back on Rich Data Streams (http://mail.python.org/pipermail/edu-...). Some of the suggested sources of data:

Data set ideas for the OLPC project: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Educational...

CIESE Collaborative Projects: http://www.k12science.org/collabprojs...

LT Technologies spreadsheet resources: http://www.lttechno.com/links/spreads...

List of Spanish names: http://wiki.gleducar.org.ar/wiki/Nomb...

XML dataset of cities: http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/python...

Reusable Data for Education Exercises: http://wiki.python.org/moin/EduSig/Da...

And the dataset from http://www.theyrule.net/ could be very interesting to play with.

I hope that helps. I love the idea of your project, and would really like one-stop shopping for all of these data sets, especially as a place to point students, friends, and colleagues at.