Design Question

I have a design question that I would like to bounce off some of you  
more experienced WO developers..

I have some static data that I need to access from within an  
EOGenericRecord. The data, unfortunately, is not in the DB (and even  
if it were, creating a relationship to the entity would likely not  
work for various reasons). The data is essentially a dictionary of  
keys / values that describe the meaning of the coded values in one of  
the database tables. E.G.

Entity: PatientAllergy
	Attribute: AllergyCode

where AllergyCode is some number (say 83). The meaning of that number  
is in this dictionary (e.g. value = 83, description = "penicillins")

What is the best way to accomplish this? I have considered the  
following:

1) read this dictionary into my Application object at startup. Sounds  
great, but I cannot figure out how to access EOApplication from an  
EOGenericRecord
2) read this dictionary form disk into each EOGenericRecord at the  
time it is created. I think that this would work, but it creates a  
lot of unnecessary repetition of data.
3) hard-code the dictionary into an abstract class extending  
EOGenericRecord and have the Entity inherit from it.

Obviously, I would love to use 1) but I am stuck as I describe above...

Is there any way to accomplish number one or are there other  
alternatives that I have not thought of or considered?

Thanks!

Mike