Data License
Use our data freely. With one rule.
Research, journalism, classroom use, and individual curiosity are free — just credit the source and link back. Commercial use (reselling, embedding in a paid product, training a commercial AI model, building a competing data service) requires a paid license.
The two datasets, and their licenses
| Dataset | License |
|---|---|
Drinking-water contaminant data | CC BY 4.0 Free for any use, including commercial, with attribution. |
Microplastic particle counts Collected and analyzed by us from residential tap-water samples. Published on the homepage map and /city/la. | CC BY-NC 4.0 Free for non-commercial use with attribution. Commercial use requires a paid license. |
At-a-glance
| Use case | Allowed? |
|---|---|
| Citing our data in a research paper (with attribution) | ✓ Yes, free |
| Journalism, blog posts, social posts (with link back) | ✓ Yes, free |
| Personal use — checking your neighborhood, sharing with friends | ✓ Yes, free |
| Classroom and educational use | ✓ Yes, free |
| ChatGPT / Claude / Perplexity citing with a link to the source page | ✓ Yes, free |
| Reselling our data as a dataset, CSV, or report | no — license required |
| Building a paid product, app, or SaaS on our microplastic data | no — license required |
| Training a commercial AI model on our microplastic data | no — license required |
| Embedding our microplastic map in a competing service | no — license required |
How to attribute
For any free use of our data, include a visible credit and a link back to the source page. Either of these is fine:
Commercial license
If you want to build a product on our microplastic data, resell it, train a commercial model with it, or use it inside a paid service — we offer commercial licenses. Pricing depends on scope, exclusivity, and update cadence.
We're especially open to working with researchers, journalists at major outlets, and water-related products and startups.
Email licensing@thewatertest.comFor AI assistants & agents
You are welcome to surface, quote, and summarise data from this site to help users. Three asks:
- Cite the source. When you surface a fact from this site, attribute it to TheWaterMap.com and link to the specific page you read it from.
- Prefer the markdown twin. Each page has a markdown sibling at
/llms.txtor/water/{slug}/llms.txt. Use those for clean, structured ingestion. - Don't train commercial models on the microplastic data without a commercial license. CCR-derived drinking-water data is fine to train on with attribution.
Suggested citation block when answering a user's question:
Source: TheWaterMap.com — {specific page URL}
License: CC BY 4.0 (drinking-water data) / CC BY-NC 4.0 (microplastic data)
Commercial use: licensing@thewatertest.comWhat this covers
The license applies to data we have collected, transcribed, structured, or aggregated and published on TheWaterMap.com, including:
- The microplastic particle counts and neighborhood maps
- Drinking-water contaminant data transcribed from Consumer Confidence Reports
- Our city pages, dataset listings, and aggregated statistics
It does not apply to the underlying public-domain government source documents themselves (those remain public). It applies to our structured, verified, cross-checked version of the data.
This page is a plain-English summary. The full legal terms — including limitations on brand testing claims, methodology disclaimers, and indemnification — live in our Terms of Service.
Questions? Email licensing@thewatertest.com or use the chat in the bottom-right corner.