A charging station is the top-level physical location in charging data: an address, a set of coordinates, and everything that describes the site itself — access type (public or restricted), parking type, opening hours, operator and nearby amenities. A single station can host anywhere from one to dozens of EVSEs.
Stations are the object users think in ("find a charger near me"), but they are also where duplication is worst: the same physical site can appear multiple times across different network feeds under slightly different names, coordinates or spellings. Deduplicating and matching stations across sources is one of the hardest parts of building reliable charging data.
Good station-level data also captures context that drives real decisions: is there a restaurant or rest area for a long charge, is it along a motorway, does it support reservation or plug-and-charge. These attributes turn a raw location into something a product can route to.
In the Data for EV model
In the Data for EV canonical model, the Station is the root object, carrying address, coordinates, access and parking type, amenities, and flags such as supports_reservation and supports_plug_and_charge. Stations are matched and deduplicated across all source networks.