To get ahead of the game (while I’m not sick), I created a Berkeley-area doctors maps mashup using screen-scraped data from my health care provider. I’m not a great interface designer, so it’s Web 1.0-certified, complete with frames. What the interface lacks in pizzazz, it hopefully earns back in simplicity: there’s a list of medical specialties on the left, and when you click on one, the providers that match that speciality display on the map in the window on the right.

Getting the data in shape was the hardest part, and required quite a bit of Perl elbow-grease with a little MySQL database design thrown in. From there, a little PHP hacking leveraging the Yahoo! Maps API and voila! That pediatric gastroenterologist that I hope you will never need is just one click away.

While the data part of this equation was difficult (it would have been WAY easier if this information was available via RSS), I think the utility of such an application made the data parsing worth it.

This module provides a way to load a PHP interpreter into your Perl programs. The PHP interpreter then automagically has access to all of the modules and variables loaded into Perl. So PHP executed from Perl can use any Perl modules.

This is so cool and generally amazing (and it gave me the opportunity to debut the word “mashup” on this blog). When you’re remixing at the language level, you’re enabling all sorts of potential. Go Team Bricolage!