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. 
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