Battersea Arts Centre Digital Archive powered by Omeka

At the occasion of 120th anniversary celebration of the opening the building, the Battersea Arts Centre (BAC) in London together with Klokan Technologies GmbH have launched the digital archive website powered by the open-source software and online community. BAC created this vital online resource which will help to develop more partnerships, reach new audiences and follow the BAC's mission: to invent the future of theatre.

http://www.bacarchive.org.uk/

Omeka 2.0

Klokan Technologies have adjusted and deployed Omeka (http://www.omeka.org/), the open source content management system for online digital collections. Specialized in development of applications of open-source software for the culture heritage sector, we customized the Omeka core for BAC project and enriched it with new functionality and custom theme.

Omeka was designed to satisfy the needs of institutions that lack extensive technical staff and large budget and allows the archive to expand and improve as the online user community employ the available contribute function.

Technology

Unique photo wall technology has been used for exploring the attractive content (as you can see on the picture). We have applied a new fast zooming approach for even better interaction experience with the scanned photos and other digital artifacts. Audience can also use an instant search function with advanced filtering by time and additional attributes.

Klokan Technologies GmbH offer culture heritage institutions development of similar online applications, which open the archives and documents to completely new forms of exploration, discovery and online research and ensure the preservation of the originals.

The Austrian National Library - the first 100,000 papers on the web

The Austrian National Library scanned first 100.000 complete historical books from the beginning of 16th century until the second half of the 19th century within the project Google Books. These unique historical books are now accessible online.

You can read the Press Release here:
http://www.onb.ac.at/services/presse_21764.htm

Klokan Technologies provided the Austrian National Library with the open-source software for the display of scanned books from JPEG2000 format.

Klokan Technologies created mentioned open-source by the implementation of IIIF protocol. Used protocol was defined by the consortium of people from Stanford University, Oxford University, British Library etc. (for more info please visit:  http://www-sul.stanford.edu/iiif/image-api/1.1/). The IIIF image API specifies a web service that returns an image in response to a standard http or https request.

About 600.000 copyright-free works are supposed to be digitized.

His Majesty King Willem-Alexander opens the exhibition of Atlas Neederlanden rendered with MapTiler

His Majesty King Willem-Alexander opens today the exhibition of Atlas Neederlanden.

The MapTiler software has been used to produce the interactive online presentation of the historic maps from this atlas.

Klokan Technologies GmbH in cooperation with the team from the University of Amsterdam has been processing these beautiful maps on the Dutch national research HPC Infrastructure of the SURFsara supercomputer centre.

The special collection of historical maps shows in the map image the genesis of the Kingdom of Netherlands. The Atlas of Neederlanden which was recently restored and digitized and processed with the MapTiler software. This atlas consists from nine parts and contains 618 maps of the Netherlands from the 17th to the early 19th century and represents the largest collector atlas of the country.

The digital version is available online at:
http://mapserver.sara.nl/atlasderneederlanden/atlas/

The exhibition called Atlas of Neederlanden: the dawn of the Kingdom at the University of Amsterdam which was opened by His Majesty King Willem-Alexander on October 18 2013 and will last until 9 February 2014 celebrates 200 years Kingdom of the Netherlands.

It began in 2010 with the restoration and digitization of maps. The process was completed late last year. This made it possible to publish these maps for the first time.

    

WebGL accelerated Georeferencer presented on ICA conference in Rome

On ICA conference in Rome (19-20 Sep. 2013) Hynek Pridal from Klokan Technologies presented integration of Polynomial and Thin plate spline transformation into Georeferencer. Those are more accurate for some of the use cases. Up to now this was done only with special map server software with OGC WMS needing installation on the local server. Now it is possible using html technologies such as .HTML5 Canvas, SVG or WebGL which means no installation on your server and no troubles consequently.

WebGL allows hardware accelerated graphical operations on a web page. A graphic card of your own computer is utilized and therefore the overall performance is much higher then experienced ever before. Maps appears faster and there is no need to store georeferenced and non-georeferenced copies of the maps separately - so it is possible to save on the digital storage as well.

TileServer: WMTS from map tiles and MBTiles

Do you want to host your maps online according the OGC WMTS standard? Did you know you can do that from an ordinary PHP web hosting?

Your maps could be used on the web and in mobile devices, but also opened in ArcGIS for Desktop from ESRI or in the open-source QGIS and other desktop GIS clients and systems. There is no need to install any special server software such as MapServer or GeoServer to achieve this.

On the 26th International Cartographic Conference in Dresden, Germany we have announced a new TileServer project which allows exactly this.

The presentation contains a step-by-step guide how to convert GeoTIFF or other raster geodata files into tiles and WMTS online endpoint.
Any ordinary webserver is supported  - no need to install additional server software - so the publishing process is extremely easy and the maps are very fast.

http://tileserver.maptiler.com/

The TileServer comes with a nice JavaScript interface showing the list of the published maps, sample viewers in Google Maps, Leaflet and other web libraries including copy&paste ready code. Both tiles in a folder as well as the MBTiles are supported.

There are also step-by-step guides for desktop GIS software which is supported:

• QuantumGIS Desktop 1.9+ - open with Layer->Add WMS layer - http://www.qgis.org/
• ESRI ArcGIS Desktop 10.1+ - native WMTS implementation supported http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis/arcgis-for-desktop
• ArcBruTiles plugin for ArcGIS 9.3+ - via TMS endpoint http://arcbrutile.codeplex.com/
• GAIA - native WMTS (issues with 3857 to be fixed) http://www.thecarbonproject.com/gaia.php

The maps are of course usable with:

• Web mapping via Google Maps API, Leaflet, OpenLayers, MapBox.js via TileJSON
• iOS mobile devices (iPhone/iPad) via MapKit or RouteMe
• Android tablets and mobile phones via OSMDroid and Google Maps Android API

Check the presentation and feel free to download and try the open-source TileServer-PHP project.

To convert your geodata into tiles you can use our http://www.maptiler.com/.

The TileServer PHP project website:
https://github.com/klokantech/tileserver-php/

Video recording of the presentation:
https://plus.google.com/112524594087395104243/posts/YDdRPtah7cn

Slides for presentation:

http://www.slideshare.net/klokan/dresden-icc2013tileserver

The TileServer-PHP projects has been co-developed together with NOAA - and in fact it has been successfully used on the official Hurricane Sandy Response Imagery service where it has replaced ArcIMS server for large number of simultaneous visitors - from the web and mobile application as well as GIS clients.

Coding session of our developers

Our today's effort is your tomorrow's profit

In the beginning of July we have made a coding sprint and hacking session with the Klokan Technologies GmbH core developers together with a few guests interested in programming and hacking with us.

This has been great few days - where some of the fruits of our work and results are or soon going to become available as part of our products and open-source projects.

What have we done?

Well, for example the Georeferencer online service supports now directly the world-wide unique WebGL in browser transformation into Polynomial and Thin Plate Spline map overlays for thousands of maps:

http://blog.klokantech.com/2013/04/map-overlays-with-webgl-affine.html

You can open and play with one for example here:

http://mzk.georeferencer.com/map/d0ngDwXZ0vWQcjyxPLVXxV/201211062312-aW6vz1/visualize

Just click on Polynomial or TPS buttons. Do you like it?  Share your experience with us!

The MapTiler Pro and the open-source OGC WMTS TileServer, which is going to be presented on the International Cartographic Conference in Dresden 2013 (http://www.icc2013.org/) and on FOSS4G (http://2013.foss4g.org/) has moved significantly forward too and we have now set a clear roadmap for further development.

There are many more cool new things in our labs, which are going to be announced later this year!

Stay with us and enjoy our products.

MapTiler Pro launched

The new Pro version of MapTiler with a graphical user interface provides more comfortable way of using the software, while the advanced users can still utilise the command line for complete automation and batch processing.

The MapTiler Pro is enhancing and replacing the older MapTiler Cluster product. All our customers are being upgraded now.

MapTiler and MapTiler Pro converts raster maps into a format suitable for web applications, mobile devices and 3D visualisation. It provides the easiest way how to prepare raster geodata for mashups, apps and for Google Earth. It produces either a folder with tiles and simple HTML viewer or the MBTiles data format.

Raster maps and images are transformed into tiles compatible with Google Maps, OpenStreetMap, Microsoft Bing, MapQuest or MapBox and can be used as overlay or standalone background maps. The maps can be also visualised in 3D form by Google Earth.

Developers can easily render raster geodata into map tiles suitable for Google Maps API mashups and native mobile applications (iPhone/iPad/Android) made with Apple MapKit, RouteMe or OSMDroid.

MapTiler Pro 0.4.1 has following added features:

• Graphical user interface for Windows and Mac OS X for rendering of multiple files (GeoTiff, MrSID, ECW,...) into a seamless map layer
• Support for direct output into MBTiles format
• Leaflet viewer automatically generated for all maps, next to Google Maps API V3
• Improved progress bar status for rendering
• Drag and Drop files and improved dialog for spatial reference systems
• User friendly installer under Windows and fixes of various bugs
• A new cheaper license option - with availability for one month

Contact info@klokantech.com to get a free demo and more info.

Bounding Box Tool

Marc McGee from the Harvard University Library has written a great step-by-step guide on how to use the Bounding Box Tool developed and maintained by Klokan Technologies GmbH.

The practical online tool for (not only) map librarians is freely available at the address http://boundingbox.klokantech.com/ and it allows visual selection of geographic coordinates for direct copy&paste into a library system during cataloguing in various formats such as MARC, DublinCore, CSV or KML.

The article has been published in the recent issue of the »base line« newsletter (Volume 34, Number 3, June 2013, ISSN 1943-6548) in the section »On the cataloging/cataloguing front« edited by Tammy Wong from the Library of Congress.

Base line is an official publication of the American Library Association’s Map and Geospatial Information Round Table (MAGIRT).

The complete text is open access and freely available online at: http://www.ala.org/magirt/sites/ala.org.magirt/files/content/publicationsab/baseline/34_3.pdf

We are keen to further develop such online tools in future and help with the geospatial search applications in large map catalogues and with community engagement through our Georeferencer and MapRank Search technologies.

It is really a pleasure to see our work appreciated by many map librarians all over the world!

Map overlays with WebGL: affine, polynomial, TPS transformations in JavaScript with GLSL

A new approach on how to overlay high-resolution images on top of online slippy maps (such as Google Maps, OpenLayers or Leaflet) has been introduced by Petr Pridal from Klokan Technologies at ETH Zurich (one of the world’s top technical universities) during the conference The Graphical Web 2012 / SVGOpen 2012.

The HTML5 and WebGL technology enables on demand calculation of various overlay transformations (affine, polynomial, TPS) for high resolution zoomable maps or large raster data (such as aerial photos) directly in a web browser - immediately, with instant response for an user interaction, as demonstrated in http://vimeo.com/50144414.

Technically it is an viable and scalable client-side alternative for traditional server-side services such as OpenGIS WMS or WMTS for some specific use cases.

This technology will soon be integrated with the Georeferencer online service - to be available to general public on the high resolution maps published in the David Rumsey map collection or in the British Library as well as other institutions using this service which allows to turn scans into true maps with a few clicks inside of a collaborative online interface.

The warping technology may be integrated with other third-party systems - desktop, server or mobile applications with OpenGL ES 2.0 compatible GPU. Support for transformations between custom map projections is also on our roadmap.

The record of the complete presentation is online.

This technology complements the MapTiler Cluster product, the significantly improved version of the popular open-source GDAL2Tiles utility for generating map tiles suitable for cost effective and scalable TMS and OpenGIS WMTS compatible map publishing from any cloud storage or a traditional Apache+PHP webhosting, practical for Google Maps API mashups and for native mobile applications (iPhone/iPad/Android) utilizing Apple MapKit, RouteMe or OSMDroid.

MapTiler available on the Mac App Store

The latest version of MapTiler for Mac is available on the Mac App Store for free:

http://itun.es/ch/jFlyJ.m

If you have a laptop or desktop computer from Apple running Mac OS X Mountain Lion (10.8), Lion (10.7) or upgraded Snow Leopard (10.6.6+) you can now easily install the latest version of MapTiler from the Mac App Store, as a free application.

This version of MapTiler is powered by our C/C++ rendering core, which means it is faster, it comes with new features, fixed bugs and functionality normally available only to our MapTiler Cluster customers, who are rendering large maps from multiple files for extremely fast displaying in their web applications (powered by Google Maps API, OpenLayers, Leaflet, ...), native mobile applications on Android or iPhone/iPad (powered by Apple MapKit, RouteMe or OSMDroid) or for opening the maps in desktop GIS clients (ArcGIS Desktop, QGIS, ..) as an OpenGIS WMTS layer.

Some of the cool features in the new version of MapTiler:

• New viewer built on Google Maps V3 with client side over-zooming and opacity slider 
• Maximally simplified installation on Mac and a full switch to 64bit platform
• Rendering of world maps without issues or preprocessing
• Direct optimisation of the size of the produced tiles (pngnq embedded)
• The XYZ tile addressing directly compatible with OpenStreetMap & Google Maps as the default output 
• Improved KML SuperOverlay implementation
• MBTiles support via mbutil (direct support is planned)
• Hosting the tiles with OpenGIS WMTS standard and TileJSON compatibility by TileServer Open-Source Project is possible, the rendered map tiles are openable in ArcGIS Desktop, QGIS, MapBox JS, Leaflet, OpenLayers, etc.
• Many more small fixes and improvements

A version for alternative platforms (such as Microsoft Windows) will follow soon.

MapTiler Cluster: New version

New MapTiler Cluster is released! The development still continues driven by customers’ needs and we intensively work on creating graphical user interface, which makes the usage of software more convenient.

The new version has following added features: 

• New viewer built on Google Maps V3 with over-zooming and opacity slider 
• Full switch to 64bit platforms (including Windows and Mac OSX) 
• Add own custom watermark 
• MBTiles support via mbutil 
• Possibility to host the tiles as WMTS and TileJSON 
• Support for back compatible TMS 
• Fixes on KML Superoverlay 
• Fixed several bugs 
• New user manual reflecting use cases of our customers 

Contact info@klokantech.com to get a demo.

British Library: 3rd Georeferencer pilot announced

Using Georeferencer software from Klokan technologies, another 800 items have been selected for the Georeferencer Project from the British Library’s collection of over 4.5 million maps. The last time the British Library undertook such a project 708 maps were completed in less than one week.

”It’s easy to use and highly addictive – and a fascinating way to explore the past while improving the information that underpins our digitised collections. This project brings together people’s passion for maps and history with the latest online crowdsourcing tools,” says Kimberly Kowal, Lead Curator of Digital Mapping at the British Library. 

As a result of these previous successful rounds of public crowdsourcing, those maps are now spatially enabled, allowing users to search and navigate maps online. Maps from previous rounds are accessible through the Library’s Old Maps Online portal developed by Klokan technologies.

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