Mapping with Yahoo Pipes
Yahoo Pipes Mashup
This article is part of a series on choropleth mapping, to see other solutions, please visit the introduction here.
Yahoo Pipes is an exciting tool because of its ability to create web mashups. After working with Mapeteria and Color-It, I came to the realization that it might be possible to have the simple uploading capability of Mapeteria with the large database of Color-It. The key to this system was to have Yahoo produce all the necessary data to produce a choropleth map. It took me a while to understand how Yahoo pipes operated, but once I had a rudimentary understanding, I created a small proof of concept pipe. The pipe takes in a .CSV file with simply location name and data value, and the pipe outputs a map with the location and shows the data value. The key is that no coordinate data was included in my .CSV file. Essentially I turned Yahoo’s engine into a coordinate database like Color-It. The problem of overlaying colored shapes is still being worked out, but I believe it may be possible when Yahoo incorporates more detailed coordinate data like that of region boundaries into Yahoo Maps. I am pretty sure that Google Maps has this ability to some extent; but I wasn’t able to get Yahoo Pipes to communicate directly with Google Maps.