MalaGIS

Sharing GIS Technologies, Resources and News.

In recent years, WebGIS and map visualization have become increasingly dependent on the open-source stack. As an open-source continuation of Mapbox GL JS, MapLibre is widely used on the browser side due to its top-tier visualization quality. Meanwhile, many teams have started using AI coding assistants like Cursor and Claude Code to accelerate development. However, models are not reliable when it comes to API details and common issues of specific libraries—problems such as blank basemaps or misconfigured tile sources can arise, and debugging them often takes even more time.

Recently, we noticed that the MapLibre team open-sourced a project on GitHub called maplibre-agent-skills. It provides a series of skills for common MapLibre development issues. Currently, three skills are included, with more updates to come. If you're doing MapLibre development, this is worth your attention.

Introduction to MapLibre Agent Skills

MapLibre Agent Skills is a collection of Markdown skill files for AI agents. The content covers how to build applications with MapLibre, known API calls, and high-frequency pain points from GitHub Issues and Stack Overflow. Each skill is evaluated with Promptfoo using real developer questions, making AI coding more reliable in everyday use.

Simply put, it solves the problem of "let the assistant guess less and follow verified practices more." It is especially suitable for GIS and front-end developers who are already using or planning to use MapLibre for 2D/3D web mapping.

Official website: https://github.com/maplibre/maplibre-agent-skills

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Recently, the official account of China's Ministry of State Security published an article titled "Military Secrets Leaked — Could It Be Because of This?" It pointed out that even common smart bands and watches — wearable GPS devices — can lead to the leakage of military secrets. The article was somewhat vague: "A leak of military secrets caused by smart wearable devices in a certain country has drawn global attention. At the time, an important piece of military equipment from that country was on a mission. An officer, while jogging, wore a smart sports watch that continuously recorded and publicly shared high-precision GPS data. This led to the exposure of sensitive information, including the real-time location of the military equipment, causing significant and irreparable damage to the country's national defense." It did not specify the exact data source. The author, being curious, searched for the case and found a likely match.

Strava Heatmap Incident

The Strava Heatmap Incident, also known as the "Strava fitness heatmap leak," broke out in January 2018. Strava is a highly popular fitness app among sports enthusiasts worldwide. In November 2017, Strava released a global "heatmap" of user activities. This map aggregated GPS exercise tracks uploaded by millions of users via smart wearable devices. The brighter the area on the map, the more people were exercising there.

In GIS, this is a routine data visualization. However, in January 2018, Nathan Ruser, an Australian university student, noticed a flaw while examining the heatmap: In large cities like those in Europe and America, the heatmap was bright everywhere, showing no anomalies. But in barren war zones or desert areas like Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, the map revealed bright "isolated islands" and specific routes.

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In a previous article, "Results Are In: 2025 GIS Industry Salary Survey Summary", we shared the salary landscape for the GIS industry in 2025. A year has passed, and we've launched another survey. This time, to improve statistical accuracy, we added an "Invalid Data" option, as many of our followers are still students. In this year's results, these selections have been uniformly excluded.

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During my recent internet explorations, I stumbled upon a fascinating website: Soviet Military Maps of China. I was taken aback by what I found. This collection consists of 381 declassified map sheets, originally part of the Soviet Union's military mapping of China. The creator has georeferenced these maps and built them into an online WebGIS. I tested it myself and confirmed it can also be loaded in QGIS and ArcGIS Pro.

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The global geopolitical situation has been unstable recently. In a previous article, "6 GIS Websites for Global Ship Positions", we introduced 6 GIS websites for obtaining global ship positions. Someone left a message on the MalaGIS WeChat public account asking if there is a way to get real-time positions of global aircraft? Of course, there is. Today, let's share a few commonly used GIS websites.

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March 6, 2026, QGIS 4.0 "Norrköping" was officially released. This is the first major version update in approximately eight years, since the release of QGIS 3.0 "Girona" on February 23, 2018.

Although QGIS 4.0 experienced several delays, good things come to those who wait, and the new version is finally here. Below is an introduction to the key points of the QGIS 4.0 release, as well as important considerations when migrating from 3.x to 4.x.

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From the launch of Arc/Info in 1982, to ArcView bringing desktop GIS to the masses in 1993, and the release of ArcGIS Desktop 9 in 2004, Esri spent over four decades building the world's most ubiquitous desktop mapping platform. ArcGIS Desktop was once the first choice for countless GIS professionals to open maps, edit vectors, and generate legends. Now, with official support for the ArcGIS Desktop 10.8 series (including 10.8.1, 10.8.2) officially ending, it's fair to say an era is coming to a close.

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When conducting multi-factor overlay analysis or multi-index comprehensive evaluation, a common preliminary step is to standardize a collection of raster layers from various sources to a uniform 0 to 1 range. This normalization facilitates subsequent weighted overlay procedures. Theoretically, a simple linear rescaling based on the minimum and maximum values of each raster should yield results exactly between 0 and 1.

However, many users encounter a perplexing issue when using tools like QGIS's Raster Rescale tool, the Raster Calculator, or GDAL's gdal_translate command. The resulting raster's minimum and maximum values are almost, but not quite, 0 and 1. For instance, you might expect a range of 0 to 1, but the actual statistics show values like 0.006 to 0.88, or 0 to 0.99999999999999. This discrepancy can be unsettling. Drawing insights from a relevant discussion on GIS Stack Exchange, this article explores the underlying reasons for this issue and presents a more reliable workflow.

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In GIS scenarios such as digital twins, urban modeling, and terrain mapping, point cloud data acquired by LiDAR is increasingly becoming a core asset. However, point cloud data is characterized by its large volume and diverse formats. To efficiently publish massive LAS and LAZ files to the web for loading by 3D engines like Cesium, a complex process of tiling, compression, and coordinate system transformation is often required. Although open-source point cloud tiling tools exist on the market, most still rely on the pnts format of 3D Tiles 1.0 and offer limited support for the LAZ compression format and very large datasets. We recently discovered an open-source tool: Point Tiler, which supports converting point cloud data into the v1.1 version of 3D Tiles.

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As a "benchmark framework" in the GIS field for 3D globe and map development, Cesium's monthly updates consistently deliver practical feature optimizations and technical breakthroughs for developers. In February, the three core tools—CesiumJS, Cesium for Unreal, and Cesium for Unity—received synchronized updates, and the Cesium ion cloud processing engine underwent comprehensive enhancements.

CesiumJS v1.138

As the benchmark for 3D WebGIS, the v1.138 release of CesiumJS this month focused on memory optimization and compatibility fixes. The development team refactored Megatexture, switching to WebGL2's Texture3D for handling volumetric rendering. This significantly reduces runtime memory consumption during voxel rendering. For large-scale 3D geological data, meteorological cloud imagery, and similar scenarios, this translates to smoother loading and interaction. The update also resolved several routine bugs, including image distortion on Intel Arc GPUs and abnormal label sizing for certain fonts and special characters.

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