Mobility & live data

Beyond the base map and its overlays, OpenMapX can plot real-world points of interest with live detail attached. Pick EV charging and the map fills with charging stations, each colored by whether it's available or in use, with connector types and power on click. Pick Gas Stations and you get live fuel prices per grade. There's also parking with live occupancy, shared bikes and e-scooters and car-sharing vehicles you can actually rent right now, and traffic and scenic webcams.

These are different from map overlays. An overlay paints a theme across the whole map; a mobility data source answers a question about the area you're looking at ("what chargers are near here?") and returns individual, clickable points with their own details, freshness, and source credits.

What you get

Each data source is a category you can switch on, and each plots its own kind of point with category-appropriate detail in the place panel:

• EV charging — charging stations colored by operational status, with connector types, power ratings, and operator.
• Fuel — gas stations with live prices per fuel grade (diesel, E5, E10, and national equivalents) where a pricing feed covers the area.
• Parking — parking facilities and Park & Ride lots, with live free-space counts where the upstream feed reports them.
• Bike sharing — docking stations and free-floating bikes, with the number of bikes and free docks currently available.
• Car sharing — car-sharing stations and vehicles, with availability and pricing where published.
• E-scooters — free-floating scooters and any operator no-ride, no-parking, or slow zones drawn as shaded areas on the map.
• Webcams — traffic and scenic cameras, with a still thumbnail and, for streams that support it, live video in the panel.

Selecting a category queries the visible map, drops markers, and — because these feeds are area-based — shows a Search this area chip when you pan or zoom so you can refetch for the new viewport rather than reloading constantly. Click any marker to open its place card, which inherits the same enrichment (photos, knowledge, links) as any other place on the map.

How it works

All of these features are built on one generic mechanism: the data-source system. It's a single integration (data-source) that defines a common contract, and every category above is a small integration that implements that contract for its domain. That shared design is why a charging station, a parking garage, and a shared scooter all behave consistently on the map despite coming from completely different upstreams.

A data-source integration answers four kinds of question for a given map viewport:

• Search — given a bounding box (and any active filters), return the points to plot.
• Detail — given one point, return the rich content for the place panel.
• Filters — describe the filter controls to offer (connector type, fuel grade, operator, available-only, and so on).
• Map context — optional shaded zones that belong with the points, such as a scooter operator's no-parking areas.

Two properties of the contract matter for everyone running OpenMapX:

Multi-source merge. A single category usually draws on several upstream feeds at once. The integration queries every feed that covers the visible area in parallel and merges the results into one set of points, so you don't pick a provider — you get whichever sources have coverage where you're looking. Fuel prices in Germany come from Tankerkönig; pan to France and the French national feed takes over; everywhere else, OpenStreetMap supplies locations without prices. The same point can even be assembled from more than one feed.

Attribution and freshness travel with the data. Every response carries the credits for exactly the sources that contributed to this view and a freshness stamp (when it was fetched, whether it's realtime, whether it's gone stale). Browsing fuel in one German city credits only Tankerkönig, not the whole European stack of feeds. The credits appear in the map's attribution strip while the layer is on and disappear when you switch it off — license-required attribution is handled for you, automatically and per-view.

Responses are cached server-side so a popular viewport isn't re-fetched from the upstream on every pan, and — like every other external call in OpenMapX — requests are proxied through your server, so upstream providers see your server's address rather than your users'.

Where the data lives

Most sources are queried live from the upstream API for the bounding box you're looking at. A number of the larger or rate-limited feeds — much of the parking catalog and the bigger national EV registries — are instead ingested on a schedule by the data-manager service, which fetches and parses the upstream feed into a local PostGIS table on a cron; the app then reads only the rows that intersect your viewport. From the map this is invisible; the practical difference is operational, covered under enabling and configuring below.

The built-in sources

OpenMapX ships seven data-source categories. The table groups them by what they show; the Origins column is a representative sample, not the full list — most categories aggregate many regional feeds, and OpenStreetMap is the global fallback for the location-only sources.

Category	What it shows	Origins (representative)
EV charging	Charging stations, status, connectors	OpenChargeMap (global), AFDC/NREL (US/CA), NOBIL (Nordics), Bundesnetzagentur (DE), France IRVE, SFOE (CH), OpenStreetMap
Fuel	Gas stations + live prices	Tankerkönig (DE), E-Control (AT), Prix Carburants (FR), Minetur (ES), OpenStreetMap
Parking	Parking + Park & Ride, live occupancy	ParkAPI / ParkenDD, MobiData BW, DB BahnPark, Autobahn GmbH, plus many city and regional open-data portals, OpenStreetMap
Bike sharing	Docks + free-floating bikes, availability	GBFS feeds via the MobilityData catalog, CityBikes, Nextbike, Donkey Republic, Deutsche Bahn, Entur (NO)
Car sharing	Car-sharing stations + vehicles	GBFS catalog, Entur (NO), Cambio, plus German municipal open-data portals
E-scooters	Free-floating scooters + operator zones	GBFS catalog, Entur (NO), NRW.Mobidrom (Voi, Lime), Felyx
Webcams	Traffic + scenic cameras, still or live video	Windy Webcams, Caltrans, Transport for London, US National Park Service, several US state DOT 511 sites, OpenStreetMap

A few notes on origins:

• Sharing categories lean heavily on GBFS (the General Bikeshare Feed Specification), the open standard most micro-mobility operators publish. The MobilityData GBFS catalog lets a single integration discover and read hundreds of operator feeds worldwide, which is why bike, car, and scooter sharing reach far beyond the named operators above.
• OpenStreetMap (queried via the Overpass service) backs the location-only sources everywhere a richer feed doesn't reach — chargers, fuel stations, parking, and webcams all fall back to it.
• Licenses vary by source, from public-domain and CC BY open data to bilateral commercial terms; each source declares its own license and attribution in its manifest, which is what feeds the per-view credits and the generated /privacy and /terms pages.

Enabling and configuring

Each category is its own integration, and the generic data-source integration it depends on must be enabled too. A category appears in the search chips only when its integration is enabled — disabling fuel, for example, removes the Gas Stations chip entirely. Manage these from the admin panel's integration list.

Many sources work out of the box from open feeds and need no setup. Others require credentials, declared per integration:

• EV charging can use API keys for OpenChargeMap, NREL/AFDC (US/CA), and NOBIL (Nordics); without them it still works from the open registries and OpenStreetMap.
• Fuel needs a Tankerkönig key for German live prices; other countries' feeds and OpenStreetMap locations need none.
• Parking can use credentials for DB BahnPark, Transport for NSW, and the Newcastle UTMC feed.
• Webcams can use a Windy key plus per-state US DOT 511 keys.

Where a source has no key, it's simply skipped and the others still answer. Keys set on an integration follow the usual config cascade — admin panel or .env.

Credentials for ingested sources live elsewhere

Sources fetched on a schedule by the data-manager service (much of parking and the large EV registries) read their credentials from data-manager environment variables in infra/docker/.env, not from the admin panel — the ingest runs in a container that can't see the per-integration config. The admin fields for those sources are kept for visibility, but the value the cron uses is the one in .env. See Managing services for the data-manager and the config cascade, and Configuration for .env.

Some sources also lean on backend services: the OpenStreetMap fallback needs the Overpass service, the ingest pipeline needs PostGIS, and the sharing categories use the transit engine and geocoder for station naming. A source whose required backend isn't running simply stays quiet rather than erroring. See Managing services for enabling those backends.

Related features

• Map layers & overlays — the whole-map themes these point sources complement (including a live-transit-positions overlay).
• Places — the place card that opens when you click a data-source marker, with photos, knowledge, and reviews.
• Search — the search bar and category chips these sources appear in.
• Directions and public transit — routing to a charger, parking lot, or station you found here.