Mapper of the Month: Wille Marcel (Brazil)

29.12.2018 - escada

Who are you ?

I’m a OSM mapper from Brazil. I started studying programming by myself at the same time I got involved with OpenStreetMap. It lead me to focus my career on development of GIS applications. Besides work, I dedicate most of my time to the DeROSE Method, it’s a high performance and life quality methodology.

When and how did you discover OpenStreetMap ?

I discovered it in 2010 on some open source software conference.

What do you map ? Is there any difference with your early days?

In my early days, I mapped a lot of streets and roads using satellite imagery and GPS traces, as the OSM community was very small at that time. I always liked to map cycleways, bicycle parkings and points of interest. I’m very interested on improving routing to pedestrians as well and on fix errors on the map. We have many streets missing names in Brazil, so I’m always adding names as well.

How do you map ?

Nowadays the main tools I use are Maps.me, Mapillary, iD and OSMCha. I use a TMS layer of street names too. I like to go out to survey and I do a lot of armchair mapping as well. In the past I have mapped an entire town only with GPS.

How do you conduct your surveys ?

I like to schedule a meeting with other mappers to survey, but I do a lot of survey when I go to some new place and I have some free time to map. Generally I map with Maps.me and I take notes on paper or make some photos.

Where do you map ?

I like a lot to map when I’m travelling, but mostly I map the places where I’m living or some region of Brazil that needs some mapping.

What is your biggest achievement as mapper ?

I think developing OSMCha was my most relevant contribution to the project. It started as a personal necessity and matched with what the OSM communities and related companies needed.

Why do you map ? What motivates you ?

I’m really passionate to collaborative projects as OSM, Wikipedia and Open Source software. I like the idea of building a dataset that belongs to all humanity.

What is the most difficult part of mapping ?

I think the OSM tags are the most difficult part of OSM. In some cases the tags are excessively detailed and have a huge number of options, on the other hand, we still miss tags to describe some kind of places. I feel that it’s very hard to a new mapper to understand the road classification options. Another problem is that most tags were created to match with the UK or European reality and, sometimes, it doesn’t match with the way the things are organized in other parts of the world.

What are your mapping plans for the near future ?

I would like to contribute doing some address imports and building some new resource to help the community to map better.

Do you have contact with other mappers ?

Yes, I have organized a lot of meetings and met with mappers from all the world.

Do you use OpenStreetMap yourself ? How ?

Yes, it’s my main data source when I’m searching for a place or tracing bicycle, foot or car routes.

Yes, I created OSMCha and I have being working on its development for almost two years. I also work for the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, developing some of the software they use.