With an increasing number of electric vehicles on our roads each year, open access to up-to-date charging location information has become crucial for EV drivers looking to find charging stations according to their needs. Without easy access to this information, EV drivers face a poor driver experience when wanting to charge their electric vehicle. To combat this issue, Open Charge Map, the provider of open, worldwide POI data, has joined forces with the Share&Charge Foundation to provide easy access to open POI data over the Open Charging Network. Since the Open Charging Network is an open-source software based on the OCPI protocol, Charge Point Operators can simply update data by using their OCPI API connected to the OCN.
To meet the growing demand of EV drivers worldwide, more and more charging infrastructure is being installed with approximately 190,000 charge points currently in Europe, up from 4000 in 2011*. EV drivers are heavily reliant on public and semi-public infrastructure and the information about location and availability of the charging station is of equal importance. Open Charge Map is at the forefront of tackling this issue by providing open Point-of-Interest data of Charge Points. It has over 190,000 charge points in its database, which are sourced from Charge Point Operators, national registries and users worldwide. Its data is highly valuable for many organisations and users of EV charging location data and the API saw over 4 million API calls in August 2020 alone, ensuring drivers using a wide variety of apps and services know about every charging location available.
Open Charge Map has joined forces with the Share&Charge Foundation to provide charge point operators a simple way to share and update their POI data and make it available to many eMSP services. It makes use of the Open Charging Network, open source software to implement simple, secure and cost-efficient data-sharing based on the OCPI protocol. ”By using the OCN, we can simply receive location data in the OCPI format, with one single API connection. For a community-driven project like the Open Charge Map having as little effort as possible for making API connections is highly beneficial”, says Christopher Cook, CTO of Open Charge Map. Micha Roon, CTO of the Share&Chare Foundation comments on the partnership: “The vision of the Open Charging Network is to simplify connectivity between operators and service providers in electric vehicle charging. Our collaboration with Open Charge Map is an important step in making this vision a reality”.
Open Charge Map has set up an OCN Node and connected their open charging location database to it. Charge Point Operators are now invited to send location data in OCPI format by using the following country_code and party-id on the Public Open Charging Test Network: AU-OCM. Learn more here: Public Test Network.
Networks are also invited to get in touch with Open Charge Map at [email protected] or join the public community discussions at https://community.openchargemap.org/
* Data from the Autovista Group “Boosting Europe’s EV charging infrastructure“. February 2020.
About Open Charge Map:
Open Charge Map is a non-commercial, non-profit, electric vehicle data service hosted and supported by a community of businesses, charities, developers and interested parties around the world. Its aim is to work with the community to develop and provide a high quality, public, free, open database of charging equipment locations globally to avoid the proliferation of independent conflicting charging location maps/websites/applications and to provide (as much as possible) a reliable single point of reference for charging equipment location information.
About the Share&Charge Foundation:
The Share&Charge Foundation is an independent non-profit organisation. Supported by strong members from the e-mobility industry, its purpose is to enable open innovation for a better electric vehicle charging experience. For this, the Foundation is curating the “Open Charging Network” – an open source software solution for simple, cost-efficient and secure eRoaming based on the OCPI protocol.