Yahoo! Pipes: Location Extractor Module
I saw that crschmidt.net was having a little bit of trouble with the Pipes Location Extractor and I realized that our documentation is too short.
Location Extractor normalizes the location information in feeds that have already been geo-coded in some form. For example, if you are using any of the various forms of geo-coding a feed with tags it should work.
Supported formats are GML, W3C Basic GeoRSS, simple GeoRSS, Yahoo! Local’s API format, KML’s “LookAt” tag, and some variations on nearly all of those. Additionally, there is some support for extracting geo data from links to Yahoo! Maps, Google Maps, and Mapquest.
Once this data is extracted, you can access the Latitude and Longitude via the y:location element. When the data is rendered back out as RSS, we use abbreviated W3C Basic Geo which is just geo:lat and geo:long tags. (Note: this format is supported by the Yahoo! Ajax Maps API)
The feature of geocoding addresses in unstructured text is not yet available, but will be coming shortly via a new module.
Hope that helps!
Posted: February 10th, 2007 under Yahoo, georss, maps, pipes.
Comments: 4
Comments
Comment from Christopher Schmidt
Time: February 10, 2007, 2:09 pm
Note that my interest is primarily self-interest: Since I work someplace that sells location extraction from unstructured text, my goal was to determine how well the Location Extractor I’d been hearing so much about performed.
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Time: February 12, 2007, 7:32 pm
[...] I’ll probably get back with a real Yahoo!Pipes mashup using the Location Extractor Module in the next few days. One weird thing I noticed, though. [...]
Comment from Russ Engle
Time: July 11, 2007, 7:38 pm
Hi Edward,
I have a simple feature request to add to your “Location Extractor” module.
Please clone and look at my “Fremont MLS Listings” pipe. Since I have structured .CSV data, I pre-loaded item.y:location.street, city, state, postal and country. Then I expected “Location Extractor” to add the lat and lon attributes for me. This would be easy to implement:
1. If y:location.street, etc. values are pre-filled, then look-up and enter lat and lon,
2. Else, do whatever you are already doing.
Please share this with your team members and let me know if you will be able to add this feature, and if so, when it is available for use.
My ultimate goal is to map the Bay Area MLS on Yahoo! maps and google earth, with pop-up property photos and basic info.
Thanks!
Russ
PS BTW, I’m not just a Realtor - I worked as a C++/Java/DB, etc. software consultant for many years before that. I’m having fun playing around with your pipes tool. 
Comment from edward
Time: July 12, 2007, 10:23 am
Hi Russ,
That’s unfortunately missing from the current version, but we are definitely addressing it. Just stand by and you should see something soon, and I’ll send you a mail when it’s up.
-edward
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