Heterogenious Places with Metadata

Places right now are treated as homogeneous - they are simply numbered, and the Place class does not have any metadata. In reality, I want to have multiple kinds of places, e.g. 100 CUDA places and 1000 compute places and 10 database places. I can probably do this now, but it will be awkward, since I am receiving a flat array of places from command line or environment. What could help is:
1) associating some metadata with a place, and store it in Place class. Bare minimum: type or name field
2) extending the hostfile format to XML or JSON, so that it can hold arbitrary metadata about each place, and make this available from Place class
3) a call to load places, thus avoiding fixed configuration. Useful when your program is a service (no need to launch another process, just load a set of places from configuration file or stream)