MalaGIS

Sharing GIS Technologies, Resources and News.

For GIS professionals, obtaining high-precision, global distribution data for energy facilities—particularly emerging sources like photovoltaics (PV) and wind power—is often challenging. While open-source maps like OpenStreetMap provide some data, they frequently fall short in terms of timeliness, coverage, and attribute detail required for rigorous scientific research or commercial analysis. Recently, Microsoft, in collaboration with organizations like The Nature Conservancy (TNC), launched a significant open-source project on GitHub called the Global Renewables Watch (GRW). The research team utilized high-resolution satellite imagery and deep learning image segmentation models to conduct a quarterly analysis of global high-resolution satellite images from Q4 2017 to Q2 2024. This process automatically identified PV and wind power installations worldwide, accompanied by estimated construction dates and pre-construction land use information.

Data Overview

Coverage: Globally processed
Data Volume: Over 13 trillion pixels
Detections:

• PV Power Plants: 86,410
• Wind Turbines: 375,197
  Data Format: gpkg (GeoPackage)
  Temporal Range: Q4 2017 to Q2 2024

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This afternoon, while I was browsing the Mala GIS group, a user named @zheer discovered a pop-up demanding unpaid wages in an open-source Cesium examples project. This immediately piqued my interest, so I opened it to explore. The project summarizes common effects in Cesium development with over 200 demos, and also includes over 100 demos developed with ThreeJS. It's lamentable that such a talented developer had to resort to using an open-source project to plead for their wages, which is quite disheartening.

Open-source project address: https://jiawanlong.github.io/

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OSRM (Open Source Routing Machine) is a high-performance routing engine written in modern C++, specifically designed for computing the shortest path in road networks. Its core objective is to provide a fast, reliable, and customizable routing solution capable of handling continental-scale road network data, returning results in milliseconds. It serves as an ideal underlying engine for building applications such as map navigation, logistics distribution, and location-based services.

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In a previous article "Accessing Pre-Vectorized Trail Data from China's Outdoor Platform: Two Step Road - MalaGIS", I introduced a popular domestic platform for downloading, sharing, and hosting trail data. Many users found it quite useful, but some outdoor enthusiasts raised concerns: what if such a platform shuts down? Would they still be able to safely download their own data? I cannot guarantee that, but if you have such concerns, an open-source trail data management platform called Wanderer is recommended.

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In a previous article "Maptalks: An Open-Source Alternative to Cesium for Geospatial Visualization", we introduced maptalks as an alternative framework to Cesium. Recently, we discovered another open-source 2D/3D engine: three-tile. Designed for lightweight implementation with ongoing functional improvements, it already meets significant development demands. Here is a brief introduction.

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While updating to QGIS 3.40.3, I stumbled upon a surprising fact: QGIS is now 23 years old – possibly older than many of its users. It’s remarkable that this powerful open-source GIS software, used worldwide for mapping, data processing, and service publishing, was born in the dial-up internet era. Since Gary Sherman wrote its first line of code in Germany in 2002, QGIS has quietly revolutionized spatial technology for 23 years. Debuting five years before the iPhone and thirteen years before TensorFlow, this open-source GIS has not only survived three technological earthquakes (the dot-com crash, mobile revolution, and AI explosion) but evolved from a basic map viewer into global geospatial infrastructure. Let’s journey through time to uncover how this "living tech fossil" defied commercial giants to become king.

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When integrating Cesium into a legacy UMI3-based WebGIS project, Node version compatibility issues arose due to Cesium's requirement for Node ≥18.18.0. Direct Node upgrade would trigger extensive regression testing, making alternative deployment approaches necessary.

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When deploying CesiumJS projects, the library's substantial size (~100MB) often slows CI builds. This analysis evaluates domestic CDN options for external Cesium loading to optimize deployment efficiency without compromising functionality.

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Following Bentley Systems' acquisition of Cesium and its increasing commercial integration, GIS professionals are exploring alternative open-source solutions for 3D geospatial projects. Maptalks emerges as a viable option, particularly for projects requiring domestic innovation ecosystem compliance.

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During discussions in our GIS community chat, a colleague humorously noted: "After three years in 3D GIS, my most frequent projects are dashboards." This resonated widely among GIS developers, highlighting a common industry reality—dashboard projects dominate the WebGIS landscape. While not technically complex, these projects demand meticulous attention to aesthetic details like color schemes that consume disproportionate time.

Introducing BigDataView: An open-source repository of dashboard templates designed to alleviate this pain point.

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