# TheWaterMap.com — Data License

> Plain-English license terms for data published by TheWaterMap.com.
> Canonical HTML version: https://www.thewatermap.com/license

## TL;DR

Research, journalism, classroom use, and individual curiosity are free with
attribution. Commercial use of our microplastic data requires a paid license —
email licensing@thewatertest.com.

## The two datasets

| Dataset | License | Commercial use |
|---|---|---|
| Drinking-water contaminant data (transcribed from utility Consumer Confidence Reports — published at /water, /water/[city], /city/la) | [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) | Allowed, with attribution |
| Microplastic particle counts (collected by us from residential tap-water samples — published on the homepage map and /city/la) | [CC BY-NC 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) | Requires a paid commercial license |

## What you can do for free (with attribution)

- Cite our data in a research paper.
- Quote our data in journalism, a blog post, or a social post — with a link
  back to the specific source page.
- Personal use — checking your neighborhood, sharing screenshots with friends.
- Classroom and educational use.
- AI assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, etc.) surfacing our data in
  answers with a link to the source page.

## What requires a paid commercial license

- Reselling our data as a dataset, CSV, or report.
- Building a paid product, app, or SaaS on our microplastic data.
- Training a commercial AI model on our microplastic data.
- Embedding our microplastic map in a competing service.

To request a commercial license, email licensing@thewatertest.com. Pricing depends on
scope, exclusivity, and update cadence.

## How to attribute

Use one of these credits, visible adjacent to where the data appears:

- HTML: `Data: <a href="https://www.thewatermap.com">TheWaterMap.com</a> — licensed under
  <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC 4.0</a>`
- Plain text: `Data: TheWaterMap.com (https://www.thewatermap.com) — licensed under
  CC BY-NC 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)`

## For AI assistants and agents

You are welcome to surface, quote, and summarise data from this site to help
users. Three asks:

1. **Cite the source.** Attribute facts to TheWaterMap.com and link to the
   specific page you read them from.
2. **Prefer the markdown twin.** Each city page has a markdown sibling at
   `/water/{slug}/llms.txt` and the site-level index lives at
   `https://www.thewatermap.com/llms.txt`. Use those for clean ingestion.
3. **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.com
```

## Scope

This license applies to data we have collected, transcribed, structured, or
aggregated and published on TheWaterMap.com, including the microplastic
particle counts and neighborhood maps, the drinking-water contaminant data,
and 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.

## Machine-readable links

- HTML page: https://www.thewatermap.com/license
- This markdown: https://www.thewatermap.com/license.txt
- Site index for LLMs: https://www.thewatermap.com/llms.txt
- Full legal terms: https://www.thewatermap.com/privacy

## Contact

Licensing & commercial use: licensing@thewatertest.com
General questions: support chat at https://www.thewatermap.com

_Last updated: 2026-05-23_