OpenChargeMap
Open Charge Map (openchargemap.org and commonly abbreviated to OCM) is a map and 'open data' registry of electric vehicle charging locations. The data made available through the OCM system is sourced from many locations and is often provided directly ("crowd sourced") by their users and those of apps that use OCM services. Data can be accessed via their website, through the various phone apps, or via a public API.
OCM is not a potential source of data to add or import into OpenStreetMap (see below). You may however use it to find missing objects in OpenStreetMap, visit them yourself and add them to OpenStreetMap via your own independent survey.
Open Charge Map reference tag
To link between OpenStreetMap and Open Charge Map you can add the location ID in Open Charge Map to OpenStreetMap by using the ref:ocm=* tag.
Importing from Open Charge Map?
Background information
In addition to crowd-sourced contributions, OCM also imports data from commercial and other sources once agreement has been obtained from the source owner. The attribution and licence for each of the imported locations is set according to the source owner requirements. This data is not included in the open licence and is licensed individually per location. However, should an imported location be edited by a member of the community through the web site/app then the licence for that location is reassigned to the open licence and is then considered open data.
As data in OCM comes from a wide variety of sources and contributions determining what licence, if any, applies to the OCM database as a whole is problematic. Instead, each location is licensed independently and a licence and attribution is attached to the data for each location. You can find this via the data API. While it is therefore possible to use the API to retrieve only those locations that are licensed under the CC BY-SA 3.0 licence much of the data in OCM is imported from copyrighted sources and therefore not licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Legal problems
- Locations that are not included in the CC BY-SA 3.0 license cannot be imported into OpenStreetMap without further work to assess whether their individual licence terms are compatible with OpenStreetMap.
- However, even the CC BY-SA 3.0 data is problematic with regards to importing it into OpenStreetMap:
- CC-BY-SA 3.0 is not compatible with OpenStreetMap Contributor Terms.
- Early data may have been geolocated using Google services and therefore cannot not be imported to OSM.
Even if these issues could be addressed, any potential import would need to consider practical issues such as data quality and avoiding duplication with data already in OpenStreetMap
Conclusion
It is not recommended to add data to OpenStreetMap from OCM. You may however use it to find missing objects in OpenStreetMap, visit them yourself and add them to OpenStreetMap via your own independent survey.