We’ve been discussing recently how an SOA will help us to provide better and more flexible systems for our users. Particularly in an environment where major line-of-business applications (such as HR, EDRM, Finance) support the main business processes, and there aren’t many cross-silo processes.

One area where SOA might help is in aggregating data from different sources. For example it might help for users to correlate information from the finance system and the HR system, or even from external feeds.

So it was interesting to read Tim O’Reilly’s article on Yahoo Pipes, and then to have a play with the application itself.

Yahoo Pipes is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. It provides an graphical online toolset to fetch XML feeds (RSS, Atom, web services), manipulate the contents, merge result sets together and provide an XML output.

Some of the best examples of published pipes are Picture Near Place, that allows you to search for Flickr pictures near a place (defined as US zip code), and eBay Price Watch that allows you to create a feed watching for an item on eBay within a certain price range.

I’ll publish my own when I think of something useful to pipe!