Using Semantic MediaWiki for tabular data

Question

Am I completely off-track to think about using Semantic MediaWiki to store (and organise, report on, etc.) 'tabular' data such as financial transactions or weather readings that would usually live in a spreadsheet or database?

It seems that one would need a separate, tiny, page for each tuple; but then, that's by design and perhaps it's perfectly okay.

I ask, simply because SMW seems like such a quick and easy way to get a collaborative data repository up and running.

Answer 1

Semantic MediaWiki is better suited for keeping track of Factual or Encyclopedic data, where you can have pages about everything you need to know about a certain topic.

For tabular or numerical data such as measurements, financial, sensor data, you would indeed need to create little pages about each data point, which is not practical in many cases.

However, there are extensions to Media Wiki that allow you to integrate external data sources (in MySQL databases or CSV files somewhere) with MediaWiki pages. This can allow you to have the best of both worlds - dynamic access and queries of tabular data and semantic annotations of pages around them.

Take a look at :

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:External_Data