MalaGIS

Sharing GIS Technologies, Resources and News.

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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The May Day holiday is over. I don’t know about you, but I always feel the break is way too short and I’m not done enjoying it — my mind just can’t switch back to GIS. A few days ago I came across a global May Day holiday map online, but the map had some serious boundary issues. So I decided to create one myself. This article shares the whole tinkering process, and I hope it gives you some ideas for making other interesting maps.

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For those working in remote sensing or GIS, Landsat is a familiar name: since 1972, this long-running land observation satellite program has accumulated a vast archive of imagery, serving as a critical data source for monitoring surface changes and conducting long-term time-series analysis. While the data itself can be downloaded from various platforms, connecting satellite images to real-world stories requires considerable effort. Recently, the editor discovered that the USGS maintains a thematic website at the EROS Center called Earthshots, which selects about 100 distinctive locations around the world and uses satellite imagery to showcase land surface changes over time. The editor finds it quite interesting and would like to recommend it.

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On April 14, 2026, Reuters reported from Lomé, citing Togo's foreign minister: the West African nation plans to submit a draft resolution to the United Nations, calling for a gradual phase-out of map projections such as Mercator — which often depict the African continent as smaller than its actual size — in international settings and public education materials. Instead, it advocates for greater use of equal-area projections that more faithfully represent the area ratios of countries.

Togo, located along the Gulf of Guinea and a member of the African Union (AU), has garnered considerable support from more than 50 AU member states. The AU is also advancing related initiatives, moving the question of "how the world map should be drawn" from classrooms and media onto the diplomatic agenda. The Reuters report emphasized that on commonly used world maps, Africa sometimes appears roughly the same size as Greenland, whereas in reality, Africa is about 14 times larger. This stark contrast is one of the issues Togo hopes the international community will address.

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In the previous article "Yellow River Basin SHP Data (including upper, middle and lower reaches, main stream, tributaries, lakes, etc.)", the editor shared vector SHP data related to the Yellow River Basin, including a set of DEM data. Some friends asked how to preview DEM data in 3D view in ArcGIS Pro. In fact, ArcGIS Pro itself supports 3D preview of DEM data, which is much more convenient than ArcMap (after all, it integrates 2D and 3D). It only takes a few simple steps.

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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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