New data importer for IONITY charging stations

[dimarzio]

Hello,

Since some weeks we at IONITY launched our semi public API that exposes information about our charging stations. We would like to integrate our charging stations into your project.

I know about the existence of the Excel template, but it is not really efficient (at least from our point of view) because the amount of the stations is continuously growing. So it would be great if you could implement the importer.

Would you please contact me dmitriy.neretin(at)ionity.eu?

Best regards,
Dmitriy

[webprofusion-chrisc]

Hi Dmitriy,

There are four options for data import:

• manual data entry
• template spreadsheet
• write a data importer in the same style as our other ones (https://github.com/openchargemap/ocm-system/tree/master/Import/OCM.Import.Common/Providers)
• or Push additions and edits to our API

How many stations are you looking to add?

You can either write an importer class for us or we can try to write it for you (time permitting)

In all cases, imports must take into account existing locations so that we don't import duplicates and to some extent updates must take into account edits made. I'll send you an email also.

[razzeee]

@dimarzio can you link to the api and possible docs?

@webprofusion-chrisc which importer would you use as a template?

[webprofusion-chrisc]

@razzeee thanks, the UK NCR import is recently updated but there is room for refinement of course.

[dimarzio]

@razzeee Here is the link to the documentation: http://api.ionity.eu.s3-website.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/
The access to the API itself will be a little bit bureaucratic, because according to our internal rules, you have to sign a usage agreement.

[webprofusion-chrisc]

Hi, it's important to add that we need an official open data or permissive license granted for the data. We can easily pull data from peoples APIs but we must have permission to import the data and redistribute it, otherwise we have to manually crowdsource the same information.

Once data is imported into Open Charge Map it is available for download and redistribution through our API (so Ionity etc no longer control the distribution), and for each data provider (in this case Ionity) we must have a stated license which permits us to use and redistribute the data.

In general we don't sign agreements, instead we require you publish the data with a license of your choosing (ideally public domain or creative commons) and we consume it. Generally the licesne will be stated on your website and we'll include details of the license type against each 'Data Provider'.

If that can't be done then we can't import the data.

[Edit]
Note that the likely business case for any network to publish data to us is that by publishing to Open Charge Map you are promoting your network. More people will discover charging stations if published on OCM, resulting in more charging sessions and more revenue. Consider it like free advertising in exchange for your basic charging station data.

[dimarzio]

@webprofusion-chrisc Thank you for the provided details. I'll clarify how we can continue with the topic.

@razzeee Can I interpret your question as a wish to implement the importer :) ?

[razzeee]

Well, I might be interested, but I can't really promise anything. Pretty busy with other FOSS and private life :)

Anyway, if I do something, it will only be after the license has been sorted.