Open data, openly licensed

How our licensing actually works

There is no single licence covering everything here, and any page that tells you otherwise is simplifying something it shouldn't. A record carries every obligation of every source it draws on — sometimes more than one at a time.

• Records derived from OpenStreetMap — ODbL, attributing OpenStreetMap contributors, with share-alike terms.
• Records from heritage registers (Historic Environment Scotland, Historic England, Cadw, and the Department for Communities in Northern Ireland) — OGL v3.0, acknowledging which register.
• Records created by our contributors, and facts drawn from Wikidata — CC0. Public domain, no conditions.
• Our written descriptions and curated walks — CC BY-SA 4.0.
• Photographs — licensed individually, shown on each image.
• The rendered map — a Produced Work under the ODbL, so it carries attribution only.

Why that isn't a tidy list of buckets

Many works exist in more than one source. Where an OpenStreetMap record and a heritage listing describe the same statue, we merge them into one record — and that record then owes both the ODbL's share-alike and the OGL's acknowledgement. Filing it under one licence by order of precedence would satisfy one obligation and quietly drop the other.

In Edinburgh, our launch city, that is not an edge case:

Attribution

Every published record credits every source it draws on. The credit is not typed in or copied — the database derives it from the record's own list of sources, on every write, so it cannot disagree with them. 1,544 works carry two or more credits, which is what you would expect of a catalogue built by merging registers.

It took us two goes to get there, and the second is the one that counts. Until August 2026 a merged record credited only its first source: 1,484 works were under-credited for around two months. We corrected them, and the next weekly import put the fault straight back, because the importer was still writing the credit itself. Deriving it in the database is what stopped that. If you reused anything from here before 10 August 2026, its credit line was probably short — the record pages carry the full list now.

Where the data comes from

OpenStreetMap & the ODbL

Location and tagging data sourced from OpenStreetMap is used under the Open Database Licence. Each OSM-derived record is tagged with its OSM identifier, and we credit © OpenStreetMap contributors on every map. Reuse of that portion of our database is governed by the ODbL's share-alike terms.

Open Government Licence sources

Data from public bodies such as Historic Environment Scotland, Historic England, Cadw and the Department for Communities (Northern Ireland) is used under the Open Government Licence v3.0, which we attribute to the originating body. Map tiles are © CARTO, over OpenStreetMap data.

Corrections & takedown requests

PublicArtMap is a work in progress built largely from open data, and some records will contain mistakes. Anything to do with rights, credit or attribution — an image miscredited, a work misattributed, a source unacknowledged — goes to rights@publicartmap.co.uk, which is monitored. Plain factual corrections are welcome there too, or through the contribute page.

If you are an artist, photographer or rights holder, or you appear in a photograph here, the rights page sets out what we publish and why, how to give permission, and how to ask for something to be taken down. We respond within 48 hours and take material down first where there is any genuine question.