Petr Pridal, founder of Klokan Technologies awarded Bartholomew Globe

13th December 2012, at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburg during conference “Working digitally with Historical Maps” Bruce Gittings, Vice-Chair of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society presented Petr Přidal, founder of Klokan Technologies with the Bartholomew Globe for a significant and enduring contribution to online mapping.

Taking his speech, mr. Gittings said : “Petr has been responsible for innovative software tools including GDAL2Tiles, MapTiler (which permits the seamlessly rendering of maps), IIPImage which provides streaming of high-resolution images, geographical search with MapRank and crowd-sourced georeferencing with Georeferencer. There is no doubt that his work 'bounced' the traditional field of historical cartography into the 21st century, underpinning many of the projects we are hearing about today.”

GitHub Time Tracking and Invoicing Integration

Would you like to track time for GitHub issues and pull-requests easily and receive nice looking project reports or even create invoices for your clients with one click? We do.

Because we use GitHub for almost all project development and issue tracking we wanted to connect it with a system for recording working time and providing billing - to have a possibility to present our clients with reports showing the time spend on individual tickets.

Therefore we developed an extension for web browser which adds into GitHub one-click time tracking and connects the time reports with the estimated project budget and possibility for direct invoicing. With this blog post we are releasing it for other developers, so others can use this system too.

To add into GitHub the one-click time tracking functionality integrated with all Issues or Pull requests pages, follow these steps:

1. Register the free Harvest account. They have various pricing plans, you get a full 30 day trial which turns automatically into the FREE FOREVER plan with 2 active projects, 4 active clients and unlimited invoicing. It runs just fine, because you can archive the inactive projects, of course the paid project has another advantages. With this sign-up link you may even get discount if you later on decide for a different then free plan:
   
   Register the free Harvest account

2. Install the extension / add-on for your web browser, which adds into GitHub the integration:
   
   Activate Google Chrome Extension
   or
   Activate Firefox Add-On
   

3. Whenever you visit the issues page on GitHub a new button appears next to the #ticket-number
4. With one click you can start to track the time. The dialog also shows the sum of time already spent by you on this ticket.
5. Harvest provides great project reports - with links back to the GitHub tickets.
6. You can track a contract progress based on the estimated time/costs limits, which is very helpful. The system can also send people reminder to fill the time sheets online.
7. It is also possible to directly create nice looking invoices and estimates or track late payments.

Enjoy!

Time Tracking directly integrated with the GitHub Issue Tracker.

Note: the time can be of course tracked by other means, such as with the github commit hooks, on the desktop (Mac, Windows, Linux GTK), or command line or with the mobile apps (iPhone, Android) and directly from Gmail.

Hurricane Sandy - MapTiler renders hurricane aerial photos

Hurricane Sandy was the biggest Atlantic storm in history,Category 3 storm and the second-costliest hurricane in United States history. It hit the coast of the Northeastern United States in 2012 spanning an area broader than Texas (1,100 miles).

Our software was used to track this hurricane and Map tiles were generated by our product MapTiler which rendered hurricane aerial photos provided by NOAA.

You can track this storm online at:http://storms.ngs.noaa.gov/storms/sandy/.asdf

BMArchives.org launched

New website BMArchives.org has been launched. The site provides world-wide unique selection of digitised visual and cartographic historical material (over 30,000 images and almost 7000 high-resolution maps) for the public and international scientific community, opening up avenues into a major resource base for 19th and 20th century history of Christian missionaries.

The large archive of maps, photos and archival finding aids counting over 60.000 items is now available online and accessible to anybody who is interested. Coverage of the documents is very broad and includes mostly Africa, Asia and Oceania.
Klokan Technologies participated in development of this exciting project with customization of the open-source Omeka system, with development of a unique instant search technology based around a fast JavaScript interface (powered by Closure Library and AJAX), with application of IIPImage to stream large number of images and with Georeferencer to turn those images into maps.

The metadata follows the international standards: archival description is done in compliance with ISAD(G), and individuals and organisations are described using ISAAR (CPF). In addition, thesauri are being used for geographical and subject terms. The synchronization of the archival system with the website is implemented via OAI-PMH endpoint and uses the DublinCore metadata standard.

The mentioned technologies are available also to other culture heritage institutions seeking a way how to publish own digital holdings and metadata on the web. Feel free to contact us with your enquiries for customization and application of the used open-source components.

http://www.bmarchives.org/

Google I/O - Google invited us to present our technologies

Klokan Technologies is part of the Google I/O Developer Sandbox after invitation from Google Inc. - next to the companies such as Intel, HP, Autodesk, GeoEye, etc. Showcased were our projects MapRank Search (applied in OldMapsOnline.org), MapTiler Cluster and Georeferencer (developed in cooperation with The Moravian Library).

Google engineers demonstrated our OldMapsOnline project, which allows users to find historical maps in libraries around the world, just in the beginning of the presentation on the stage:
https://developers.google.com/events/io/2012/sessions/gooio2012/901/

Our interactive Google I/O 2012 presentation from the conference booth:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQVkN8zUOws

More details available at:
http://blog.oldmapsonline.org/2012/07/google-think-we-are-cool.html

OpenLayers V3 Sprint Event

Petr Pridal from Klokan Technologies took part in the one-week meeting of 7 developers from USA, Canada, France, Switzerland, Austria and Czech republic. The goal for this sprint was to lay the foundations of OpenLayers version 3.

OpenLayers is an open-source component to display not only maps but also other scanned documents in the web browser window. Thanks to this activity, users can view the pictures and maps on all computers without using Adobe Flash and also to view such applications on mobile devices like iPad, iPhone or Android.

More information about the meeting and Open Layers at http://openlayers.org/blog/2012/06/21/ol3-sprint/

The best search service for historical maps yet built

On June 15th, Old Maps Online was presented at the Europeana Plenary meeting in Belgium. We have to quote a David Haskiya's (Europeana product developer) introduction:



"I invited Petr because Old Maps Online is the best search service for historical maps yet built. And also because he combines entrepeneurial spirit with technical insight in a way that I think is sorely needed among GLAMs."

complete post available at:
http://kadmeianletters.wordpress.com/2012/06/17/my-europeana-plenary-part-ii-the-product-development-session-and-hack4europe/

Old Maps Online and Georeferencer presented on a Conference in Barcelona

Barcelona played host to librarians and researchers from 24 different countries as they met to present their results and ongoing projects working with old maps.

Petr Pridal from Klokan Technologies was on a place and shared his ideas with other colleagues from a research field. Old Maps Online project and Georeferencer were presented. We believe that such meetings move the field of research based upon Old maps step by step to greater future and have enjoyed being present on this event.

There were two joined conferences which had very exciting programmes, both are available online:

• 18th Conference of the LIBER Groupe des Cartothécaires | Maps Expert Group Barcelona, Spain 17-18 April 2012
• 7th Workshop Digital Approaches to Cartographic Heritage, Barcelona, 19-20 April 2012

Old Maps Online Project announced in New York

David Rumsey introduced OldMapsOnline (www.oldmapsonline.org) Project in the New York Public Library, together with Petr Pridal and Humprey Southall.

This innovative search engine allows users to search through map catalogues across a number of institutions in a geographical way. Users will no longer have to spend time identifying which institution might hold the maps they want to view as, for the first time,  the holdings of individual map libraries are presented together in a single interface. 

Initial map holdings come from the David Rumsey Map Collection, The National Library of Scotland, The British Library, the Moravian Library and the map collection of A Vision of Britain through Time and more will be added over the coming months. 

The system is built on MapRank Search, created by Klokan Technologies.

Old Maps Online: New York Public Library Announcement:http://www.slideshare.net/klokan/old-maps-online-new-york-public-library-announcement