MalaGIS

Sharing GIS Technologies, Resources and News.

Recently, while (pretending to) study seriously by watching short videos, I often came across information about Xiaomi Maps. A popular speculation is that Xiaomi's nationwide road testing of the Yu9 is not just for vehicle validation but also for data collection. It sounded quite plausible. So I decided to verify it. Due to my limited connections and possible product confidentiality, I could not obtain substantial inside information. However, I have organized the publicly available information I could find.

PS: Additional information is welcome.

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In early June 2026, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) officially released the OGC Features and Geometries JSON standard, commonly known as JSON-FG, as document number 21-045r1, version 1.0.0. After a quick review of the OGC standard details, the gist is that it addresses some capability gaps in GeoJSON, further expands GeoJSON's application scenarios, unifies specifications, and reduces private attributes. If you work with WebGIS, OGC APIs, or vector data exchange tools, you can follow along to understand what JSON-FG adds and assess whether your existing projects need to support it.

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GeoServer is an open-source map server under OSGeo, playing a core role in WebGIS systems for spatial data publishing and OGC standard services. Whether it is classic services like WMS, WFS, WCS, or integration with data sources such as PostGIS, Shapefile, and GeoTIFF, GeoServer remains a common choice in many domestic government, land, emergency, and other industry projects.

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QGIS is one of the most widely used open-source desktop GIS applications globally. Vector editing, spatial analysis, cartographic output, the Processing toolchain, and 3D views are all high-frequency capabilities in daily production. On May 29, 2026, the QGIS project released two maintenance versions on the same day: 4.0.3 and 3.44.11, targeting the new QGIS 4 mainline and the 3.44 long-term support branch respectively. Based on the commit history in the GitHub Releases, this article summarizes the key updates. Both versions focus on stability fixes and experience polishing, making them suitable for teams running production projects to evaluate upgrades.

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CesiumJS is one of the core engines for 3D earth and 3D map development on the web. It is widely used in photorealistic 3D, oblique photography, BIM, and other scenarios, and serves as the "standard client" for the 3D Tiles ecosystem. On June 1, 2026, the Cesium team released CesiumJS 1.142, focusing on large-scale data rendering performance, the integration of vector tiles with 3D Tiles, and improvements to the low-level BufferPrimitive rendering capabilities. Here is an introduction based on the official Releases.

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From May 27 to 29, the 24th meeting of the Standing Committee of the 16th Beijing Municipal People's Congress was held. At the meeting, the Beijing Surveying, Mapping and Geoinformation Regulations (Draft) (hereinafter referred to as the "Draft Regulations") was submitted for deliberation. The draft consists of 8 chapters and 66 articles, and intends to replace the Beijing Surveying and Mapping Regulations enacted in 2003 through an "abolish the old and establish the new" approach.

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When working on digital twins, unified city dashboards, campus inspections, or drone survey result displays, you often need to show city white models (untextured 3D buildings). Traditional GIS data processing workflows usually involve assembling models in desktop software and then importing them into an engine, which comes with significant debugging and collaboration overhead. If you could quickly select an area in the browser, turn buildings and roads into a rotatable 3D scene, and even directly export common 3D formats for other systems, it would greatly simplify many GIS and web visualization scenarios.

In recent years, web-based 3D technology stacks have become increasingly mature, and more projects are bridging open map data with front-end rendering. I recently came across a very popular project, cartesiancs/map3d, which can generate urban 3D white models from OSM data with one click and export them in GLB format. Let me introduce it today.

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On May 9, the 2026 Forbes China Economic Forum was held at Sias University in Zhengzhou. In an interview, Zheng Qiang, a Distinguished Professor at Zhejiang University, stated that he does not agree with the concept that “Chinese college graduates are facing employment difficulties.” He said, “It’s not that they can’t find jobs, but that satisfying jobs are truly hard to find.” He advised college students to “complain less and not be too picky. How about starting with a low salary and getting a high salary later?”

After watching the video, I was a bit speechless. Reflecting on some trivial matters from my own work experience over the past few years, I’m writing this article to analyze, from the GIS industry perspective I have observed, the question: “How about starting with a low salary and getting a high salary later?”

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Peers in the GIS industry usually spend their days tracking technology releases and tenders. Every now and then, we hear news about a company going public. Has anyone else ever wondered, like I have, exactly which companies in our field are publicly listed? How big is the market‑cap gap between them? Are any of them worth a closer look? Today I’ve lined up some familiar names, grouped into platform software, remote sensing applications, surveying engineering, automotive & location intelligence, plus a few overseas heavyweights — hopefully a useful reference for anyone who needs it.

A note from the editor: The share prices come from public market data and media reports. The rough sizes are mostly calculated by multiplying the stock price by the total number of shares, with RMB figures converted at approximate exchange rates. Many of these companies straddle several sectors; I’ve only focused on the part that is closely tied to geospatial technology. This is purely industry information exchange and should not be taken as investment advice.

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On May 8, 2026, the U.S. Department of State released an official fact sheet announcing a new round of sanctions focused on cutting off Iran’s overseas military procurement and remote sensing intelligence supply chain. Three Chinese geospatial and commercial satellite enterprises were added to the sanctions list, making them the core focus of the GIS and remote sensing industry in this round of geopolitical sanctions. Below we take a brief look at the details of these sanctions.

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