Using Semantic MediaWiki for tabular data

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.

Solution 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

Solution 2:

No, I don't think it's such a bad idea.

Using SemanticForms you could enter lots of little data pages quickly and easily (for example, an invoice might require additional pages for each line item, but they could all be entered from one form using the 'multiple' feature of the for template form tag). So although I've never tried logging weather data in SMW, I think it would be pretty easy. I don't see what the problem would be with storing data across so many pages; it's easy enough to combine it in whatever formats you require.

Give it a go and let us know how it goes!

Solution 3:

You can use either the Semantic Internal Objects extension (SIO), or SMW's built in subobjects (the former works well with the already mentioned External Data extension), to store multiple semantic objects (could be the rows of your spreadsheet) in one page.

However, unless you are really looking for a collaborative tool with semantic capabilities, I doubt SMW is the best suited piece of software for your task.

edit (november 2015): Since SMW version 1.9, there nothing that SIO can do that the built-in subobjects can't, so I would recommend the latter.