The Open Charge Map API

If you wish to export charging location data into your own systems or applications the most flexible way is to use our API, which provides an export in a variety of formats. If you wish to regularly refresh the entire dataset, please clone our data from GitHub. You can also opt to run your own private API mirror.

Fair Usage Policy

The basic API is provided as a free service with no warranty or service level agreement. Providing this API to you costs us actual money for server resources and data transfer fees. See funding: https://opencollective.com/openchargemap

If you will be calling the API regularly (from an app or server) you must provide your API key as an X-API-Key header (case sensitive) or set the key=YourAPIKey url parameter. You should also set your http user-agent to a custom value to help identify your app.

To obtain a free API key Sign In and choose 'my apps' from the profile menu.

Do not repeatedly call the API with duplicate queries. Debounce/throttle your API requests to minimise the work our API has to do. The API administrator (Open Charge Map) reserves the right to ban API callers (including automated banning) if callers make excessive/indescriminate use of the API, at the discretion of the OCM administrator.

If you need to make a high volume of queries against the API please host your own API mirror or import the data into your own API.

API V3 (documentation last updated Nov 2019)

Service Base URL:

http://10.211.55.3:5000/v3/

Uptime last 7 days: last 30 days:

Retrieving POI Data

http://10.211.55.3:5000/v3/poi/

Example API Calls:

Return charging location information for the US in JSON format, limited to the first 10 results: http://10.211.55.3:5000/v3/poi/?output=json&countrycode=US&maxresults=10

The default output contains a lot of information. Here is the same call as above, but with the most compact output (formatting removed, reference data as IDs instead of full objects, null fields skipped): http://10.211.55.3:5000/v3/poi/?output=json&countrycode=US&maxresults=100&compact=true&verbose=false

Return KML format results suitable for viewing in google earth/maps etc (UK, max 500 locations): http://10.211.55.3:5000/v3/poi/?output=kml&countrycode=GB&maxresults=500

Service Parameters:

Additionally from v3 of the API onwards you can query using a bounding box, polygon or polyline (for a route etc). See here for more info on polyline encoding. :

Retrieving Core Reference Data

Our core list of lookup values is termed Core Reference Data. This is the data you would require in order to present the user with Dropdown lists etc of possible values for Connection Type etc. This only returns content in JSON format.

http://10.211.55.3:5000/v3/referencedata/

Example API Calls:

Return all reference data in JSON format: http://10.211.55.3:5000/v3/referencedata/

Optional filter parameters:

Add New Comment/Check-In

To submit a new comment or check-in again a specific POI, use the following API endpoint to POST a JSON format comment

http://10.211.55.3:5000/v3/?action=comment_submission&format=json

Your JSON submission should be in the body of your POST and contain the following (for example):

                
{
    "ChargePointID": 12345,
    "CommentTypeID": 10,
    "UserName": "A. Nickname",
    "Comment": "This place is awesome, free cake for EV owners!",
    "Rating": 5,
    "RelatedURL": "http://awesomevplace.com",
    "CheckinStatusTypeID": 0
}
            

ChargePointID is the numeric OCM-ID of the POI in location. Values for CommentTypeID and CheckinStatusTypeID can be found in core reference data.

ChargePointID, CommentTypeID and CheckinStatusTypeID are mandatory, all other fields are optional.

Linking to OCM Content and Features

In addition to the API there are a number of standardised URLs which can be used to initiate certain actions, this can be useful to launch from within an app or for hyperlinking. The user can then sign in/register as required and proceed with the required action:

POI related actions