The Open Charge Point Interface (OCPI) is a royalty-free protocol maintained by the EV Roaming Foundation. It standardizes how charge point operators (CPOs) and e-mobility service providers (eMSPs) exchange data such as station locations, live status, tariffs, charging sessions and reservations, so that a driver with one provider can charge on another network — a capability known as roaming.
OCPI defines modules (Locations, Sessions, CDRs, Tariffs, Tokens, Commands and more) and a hierarchical Locations object that runs Location → EVSE → Connector. Because it is transport-agnostic and versioned, most networks expose some OCPI-compatible representation even when their internal systems differ.
The practical problem is that OCPI is a projection target, not a source of truth: operators implement different versions (2.1.1, 2.2.1, 2.3.0), populate optional fields inconsistently, and reuse identifiers in incompatible ways. Consuming raw OCPI from many CPOs still leaves you reconciling conflicting shapes.
In the Data for EV model
Data for EV keeps its own canonical.v2 model as the source of truth and projects to OCPI 2.3.0 for interoperability. That means you get one consistent shape across all 65 networks regardless of each operator’s OCPI quirks, while still being able to consume OCPI-native identifiers where you need them.