Open Charge Map (OCM)

About the project

Open Charge Map is the global public registry of electric vehicle charging locations. OCM was first established in 2011 and aims to crowdsource a high quality, well maintained open data set with the greatest breadth possible. Our data set is a mixture of manually entered information and imported open data sources (such as government-run registries and charging networks with an open data license). OCM provides data to drivers (via hundreds of apps and sites), as well to researchers, EV market analysts, and government policy makers.

The code in this repository represents the backend systems (API, Web Site and server-side import processing) for the project. Server-side code is developed mostly in C#, currently building under Visual Studio 2022 Community Edition (or higher) with .Net 6, Data is primarily stored in SQL Server, using Entity Framework Core, with an additional caching layer using MongoDB. Most API reads are services by the MongoDB cache.

Developers can use our API to access the data set and build their own apps. The map app source (using latest Ionic/Angular/TypeScript) can be found in its own repo at https://github.com/openchargemap/ocm-app

Basic build/dev prerequisites

• dotnet 6.x sdk (windows/linux)
• SQL Server Express
• MongoDB 5.x

Local Dev Setup

• Restore SQL database clone https://github.com/openchargemap/ocm-docs/tree/master/Database/Clone
• Run OCM.Web (main website) project and create a user acccount, in User table set Permissions field for your account to administrator: {"Permissions":[{"Level":100},{"Level":1000}],"LegacyPermissions":"[CountryLevel_Editor=All];[Administrator=true];"}
• Once you have the Admin menu in the web ui, Admin > Dashboard > Check POI Cache Status > Refresh Cache (All) to rebuild local MongoDB cache. Peridocially run Refresh Cache (Modified) to ensure cache does not become stale (otherwise the SQL database will be used for queries).

Deployment

• Configure MongoDB as services and initialise ocm_mirror database
• Enable read/write for app pool user for \Temp folders
• Configure web.config

To run an API mirror, see the OCM.API.Worker readme.

Contributing

Please contribute in any way you can:

• Improve the data (anyone can do this):
  • Submit comments, checkins, and photos via the website
  • Submit new data, become an editor for your country
• Grow the user base
  • Advocacy, tell people about Open Charge Map and help them use it.
• Improve the system:
  • Help translate the app into other languages see openchargemap/ocm-app#35
  • Help write documentation
  • Web App (HTML/CSS/JavaScript)
  • Website development (MVC)
  • Map widget for embedding
  • Sample Code for developers
  • Graphic Design
  • Testing