Licences

Every dataset carries its licence on every page that uses it, not only here. Everything currently ingested is a work of the U.S. federal government and therefore in the public domain — but that will stop being true the moment a non-U.S. source is added, so the licence is stored per dataset rather than assumed site-wide.

§01

In use now

U.S. Public Domain

https://www.usa.gov/government-works

Federal spending by agency and geography (U.S. Department of the Treasury)
Hospital General Information (Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services)
TIGERweb — states and counties (U.S. Census Bureau)

U.S. Public Domain (NCES)

https://www.usa.gov/government-works

Common Core of Data — school and district directory (National Center for Education Statistics)

§02

How licences are handled

U.S. federal works

Works prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. government as part of their official duties are not subject to copyright protection in the United States, under 17 U.S.C. §105. Attribution is not legally required; it is given anyway, on every page, because a figure without a source is not worth publishing.

Sources with real conditions

Several sources on the roadmap are not public domain, and each is stored with its own terms:

World Bank — CC BY 4.0. Attribution is mandatory and will appear inline.
OECD — its own terms, with conditions on commercial use. Those pages need a decision about advertising before they are published, not after.
OpenStreetMap — ODbL, which is share-alike. It will be used for map tiles only and never merged into the entity database, because merging could pull the whole database into the share-alike obligation.

This site’s own output

The underlying government figures carry their own licences, above. The arrangement, the normalisation and the written explanations on these pages are this site’s work. Exports include their provenance in the file itself so a downloaded figure never loses its source.