The Estonian data seems to be quite outdated. The largest operator, Enefit Volt seems to be missing. The have a search page, once the operator is added I can look into whether they have an API we could use for importing (new to Open Charge Map, any tips/pointers/reading on that is appreciated).
Thanks they have been added now. For countries where we have a lot of outdated information it usually means we don’t have a lot of users in our community from there, or a previous local contributor as stopped contributing, which can obviously happen for many reasons.
Sometime when people see data they just assume someone else is fixing the problem, and so it never gets fixed.
A network operator can publish an OCPI data feed and license it so we can redistribute the information: https://openchargemap.org/site/about/datasharing
1 Like
Yeah I assumed this was the case. I am new to the EV world (picking up ours tomorrow), but hoping to fix up some of the Estonian (or, at least, Tallinn) data in the coming weeks.
I’m sure this is covered somewhere, but would love some pointers/reading on how OpenChargeMap relates to OpenStreetMap and how OCM ended up a project separate from OSM (instead of putting this data into OSM directly)?
Thanks again, I will reach out to the operator and ask if there is any interest in providing an OCPI feed.
Thanks, there’s probably an OSM thread on here but basically they didn’t want our data and when they started they didn’t have an EV metadata type. There is some incompatibility because OSM is a single specific open data license and OCM is many open data licenses (depending on where our data comes from). When I last looked ta possibly importing their data it wasn’t good enough to use, that may have changed but that would be up to someone else to research and make a case for (if there is one).
When we started in 2011 there were already about 100 charging app/networks/sites and our main objective was to provide a data set (and somewhere for more data to go). OSM can always have our data if they want it (it’s openly distributed), but I think they prefer if their own users submit their own data.
Ultimately though, we want networks to publish an OCPI data feed under an open license, then we (and anyone else, including OSM) can aggregate that, because their data is always the primary source and everything else is varying levels of outdated and incomplete info.
The issue there is that many big networks don’t want to publish data primarily because it can be used to analyze network reliability and also because they have lawyers that don’t want them to publish anything they don’t have to.
There are also thousands of networks globally and their ability to publish data has historically been very poor. In the future though we would expect them to consolidate, and to use a specific handful of backend software providers, making it easier for them to publish data feeds. So eventually manually maintained data should give way to automatically maintained data.
1 Like
Yeah, what I see is that OSM largely presents “electric chargin point” on the map but metadata is not provided (and even when it is, OSM has a tendency for stale data particularly because there is rarely any providers self-publishing/maintaining their POIs). In the end I agree that perhaps it’s better if, as you say, consumers of the data, such as Organic Maps and Magic Earth integrate OCM into their apps and merge the provided information onto the OSM-provided mapping source.
I also see “trying to push people to install our app” as one reason why there could be pushback against publishing this data, but seeing that the Estonian providers already publish a web-based experience for their chargers I hope that maybe they will be amenable to do so for the extra publicity.