Integration with OpenStreetMap

Question
21

Has there been any more progress on this?
While the OCM Team has done an incredible job in getting the project to where it is today, there just aren’t enough contributors to keep up with the rapid growth and change in the EV Charging world. For example OCM only has about 65-70% of the chargers in New Zealand and a number of locations are no longer up to date. Most general users default to PlugShare, but something like OCM is still vital for developers.
OSM may need a few new or modified tags, but seems to be the most viable way forward, they have a very large active contributor base and seem to share the same basic beliefs.

1 Like
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I can’t speak for OSM and nobody official from OSM has entered into any discussion with us. I do believe their metadata model currently lacks the fidelity we have, so I won’t personally be pushing to move to OSM, unless someone on the OSM foundation board asks us to.

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I am currently with javascript sometime :grinning: now making an app. I currently can find thousands of missing entries in OCM, based on some other database… … It could give hints to where to find new ones… I will look into OSM also and combine this… is anyone on this forum still interested in picking this up? I would definitly need all the help from contributors all over the globe to check some around there living area. Only manually added entries ( with a little help from some code ) is allowed to be added to OCM. So I can make some code to make it all go officially correct…

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In OSM and on other charger pages i can filter for simple things like showing only free (as in free beer) chargers. In OSM the charger filtering have to be set to fee=no . On openchargemap i am missing this functionality.
What fidelity does OSM lack?

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That was my impression of their data last I looked years ago (no standards for connection types, power settings were mixed between watts and kW, network operators were generally not populated and it was difficult or impossible to enforce consistent EVSE specifications). I’m not planning undertake any gap analysis between OSM and OCM myself but others are welcome to, if so they should also consider gap analysis for the OCPI locations data model and other industry standards, any future work should ideally be a “best of breed” data model.

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Tag:amenity=charging_station - OpenStreetMap Wiki pretty much sums it up:
They have:

  • brand=* - The brand name of the station.
  • operator=* - The name of the operator of the station.
  • network=* - The name of the Network, with that the operator cooperates.
  • capacity=* - The number of vehicles which can be charged at the same time. The total number of sockets can be higher.
  • ref=*
  • socket:<type>=number - Number of this socket type. There may be several socket types.
  • fee=yes/no/donation - Yes if some or all customers have to pay a fee for using the station. Donation model also possible.
  • charge=* - To specify the fee amount if fee=yes. Example usage: fee=yes + charge=0.35 USD/kWh.
  • parking:fee=yes/no/interval - Whether you have to pay a parking fee or not while charging. If the fee must be paid only on certain hours, the same syntax can be used as for opening hours.
  • opening_hours=*
  • payment=*
  • maxstay=* - Maximum time you are allowed to stay.

Note for the renderers: older versions of this page referred to amperage=* and voltage=* instead of socket:<type>:current=ampere and socket:<type>:voltage=volt respectively. These tags are still found in a number of charging station POIs. However that scheme did not allow for multiple socket types with different current and voltages.

Power output

Vehicles

Main article: Key:access § Land-based transportation

For providing the information, which types of vehicles can be charged.

Authentication and payment

Main article: Key:authentication

Main article: Key:payment

Some charging stations require authentication, even if charging is for free. Different operators use different authentication mechanisms for their charging stations. Some charging stations even support several authentication mechanisms, and the user can choose which to use.

27

In some areas they may have higher fidelity than OCM now.

  • they now have connection types
  • Power output has standardized on kW
  • i cant speak for the international situation, but thanks to NSI, the majority of stations in NZ have populated brands / network operator.

The key areas which i think OSM need to improve on are:

  • adding “Capacity AC” and “capacity DC” - or something to that effect, there are a lot of ABB stations in nz with 50 kW+ CSS/CHAdeMO + a tethered or socketed AC type 2 output from 7kw to 22kw. The stations can simultaneously charge 1 AC and 1 DC output, however you don’t really want to label capacity as 2, as its sort of misleading because you cant DCFC 2 cars at the same time.
  • Access limitations for different brands - you cant specify a tesla super / destination charger will only charge a Tesla vehicle.
  • Adding a field for Idle fees
  • Splitting the cost input into a Cost /kwh and cost /minute

Just my thoughts on the subject.

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That’s great. In that case users can go ahead and populate OSM, there’s nothing about Open Charge Map that prevents that, or is there some other expectation? What are we being asked to do?

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I’m guessing that they were asking about merging the databases in some way, as has already been discussed and answered.

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And here joins the next active OSM contributor :smiley: For the curious that want to review the current state of OSM coverage and data level of detail: Here’s an interactive map that shows all charging station entries in the database. If you have an OSM account you can even enrich individual pieces of station information like access restrictions, opening hours, etc Charging stations

@Christopher You mentioned a wee bit earlier in this thread that about 50% of OCM data is crowdsourced. That would probably be the most interesting (as in: closest to compatible) piece of data to be somehow “imported” into OSM. There’s a tool www.maproulette.org that would allow for such a data set to be imported after a manual review (that no OSM charging station already exists at that location). The most interesting question would be whether OCM contributors would allow for these contributions to be released under a more lax, OSM compatible license, e.g. the ODbL, which should be possible according to the OCM terms, right?

31

@Claudius we are currently Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) for our crowdsourced data, I’m not a license expert so can’t say whether ODbL can work or not, I guess we would need to extract that crowdsourced element and provide that as an ODbL database?

We are happy to cooperate where we can, our terms have always allowed is to relicense, realistically we would instead relicense in as permissive a license as possible (e.g. something close to public domain), so that depends which licenses OSM can ingest but we would really want attribution back to our data set as a source (e.g. this data derived from Open Charge Map OCM-NNNNN ) so there is some that there is sort of cross reference, otherwise it gets difficult to tell if an item is or isn’t the same site/information. Ideally there would be cross references form POIs to all popular data sets (e.g. this location is POI ID 12345 in PlugShare etc).

What I won’t do however, is do the work to actually import it. I straight up don’t have the time or inclination and it doesn’t benefit OCM at all as far as I can see. I think that’s a reasonable position, OSM has thousands of times more contributors and resources than OCM does. I think if they were inclined to make it a priority for their contributors they could eclipse OCMs crowd sourced data set almost overnight.

Really though, the ideal option for any project is to get the networks to regularly feed data, rather than getting the data second or third hand.