[Mediawiki-l] External data sources

[Flip Mozart]

Hello!

I am new to MediaWiki though I know some PHP programming.

I have a variety of data sources (e.g. relational databases, excel files, text files, Java beans, PHP classes, web services). I want to set up a Wiki that will read from and write to these data sources.

One idea I have is to write a custom tag (let's call it an XData tag or external data source tag), used like in this sample article:

   The city of Manila has <xdata source="http://some.almanac.or.uri">8,500,000</xdata> inhabitants.

My first question: What do you folks think about this idea? Are there other (possibly more elegant) ways of accomplishing the same objective?  Some  existing extension perhaps?  InputBox?

Let's pursue the XData idea a little further.  Suppose there is already an article on Manila (City) where the population is <xdata ...>8,500,000</xdata>.  Suppose I edit the article and changed this to 10,000,000.  I would then like to update the underlying (external) data source.
  
My questions:

1) How do I do this? Exactly which event (hook) do I use?  ArticleSave?   
2) Is there an MWiki function that checks if an article has been changed or not?  
3) How do I know if the text changed was between <xdata> tags or not (short of writing my own article text parser)?   

Serge


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