The problem of passing structured data from wikitext to external applications comes up in a wide variety of contexts, and a garden of ugly workarounds has grown around it, usually consisting of encoding the data in the HTML rendered from wikitext in some way, then external applications parsing it out and restoring the structure. Examples include #CommonsMetadata, the various services (#mcs, all kinds of Tool Labs tools) exposing mainpage/featured content (article/picture of the day, anniversaries, in the news etc), article maintenance / warning templates, infoboxes, using Wiktionary for word translation.
Eventually these issues should be handled by separating wikitext and structured data (e.g. with {T107595}) but that's a huge project and will take a while. A quick win that would be possible right now and would make the life of developers mining structured from wikitext (and editors maintaining the wikitext) would be to create a side channel where wikitext code can output structured data (with a dedicated parserfunction Lua method), in a simple hierarchic key-value format. The data could exposed by the parser and the parse API, and eventually morph into a virtual MCR slot.