This sounds good to me. If you develop such a thing, I'll try to use it!
The problem is well defined, and solutions would be demonstrably useful
and probably realistic to implement. And I agree that this is a case
where the abstraction has to be worked out carefully beforehand.
A variety of approaches are already in use, though they are probably
fairly specific to their application domain. For example, the University
of Edinburgh [1] uses a resource specification for host management that
seems particularly compact and well suited to Tcl. Resources are expressed
in the form:
host.subsystem.attribute = value
This is probably adequate for most kinds of host management, but I can
imagine that for more general purposes it might need to be extended to
tuples of arbitrary length. I'm not aware of any formal work done to
investigate sufficiency of this or other schemes, but I haven't looked
too hard. It would be interesting to hear of any you find.
References:
[1] Paul Anderson,
Towards a High-Level Machine Configuration System,
Proc 1994 Usenix LISA