We hope that visitors to the site will contact councils to ask that they participate. This will help councils to see the demand and benefits in publishing open data.

A consortium of universities have worked on other aspects of TACT3, which looked at ways to help older people to managed continence concerns. It is part of a seven-year research programme called New Dynamics of Ageing, which has been cross-funded by five research councils.

Gail manages The Great British Public Toilet Map. She has a blog called ‘Public Toilets and..‘ and is also on Twitter. The graphic design is by Jo Glover and the web developers are Neontribe.

We chose London because there were already a few London councils publishing open data, the Olympics are coming up, and the London Assembly has just written a report about London’s toilets that calls for councils to publish open data about public toilets, which includes a standard format. That report and the standard can be downloaded here.

If our funding is successful we’ll be adding data (or adding contact details to campaign for data), for councils in the West Midlands, Scotland and Wales, before making the site UK-wide.

What you could do is to ask the relevant council to publish data about all their toilets for us and anyone else to use (or, if they already provide data, to fix their data to include the missing toilet!). Then we will be able to show the toilet.

There are websites where you can add toilets directly. This is called ‘crowd-sourcing’, where the public create the data themselves. Toiletmap.co.uk is a good example.

One challenge with crowd-sourcing is: How do you know how reliable the information is? The public need to modify, correct and validate the information as well. Erroneous entries can be costly – no one likes a closed toilet.

As the councils provide the toilets, they’re in the best position to provide accurate information (in theory!). However, mistakes and omissions still exist. One thing we’d like to do in the future is to let the public assist the councils by adding corrections or improvements to council data. These fixes would be sent back to the councils for the next update.

One site with a lot of crowd-sourced public toilet locations (which others can reuse as ‘open data’) is OpenStreetMap (OSM). This map of the world was created entirely by crowd-sourcing information.

A lot of useful data about toilets (opening hours, accessibility, payment) is missing from OSM. Anyone can edit the map to add this information (including councils!). Hopefully we can also improve our site to use more OSM data in the future, and feed back into their database.

Personally we think the ultimate toilet-finding site would use a combination of open data, crowd-sourcing and individual moderators (for when entries conflict), but we still need the data.

In some areas this includes national chains, like Starbucks. However as these are franchises, the scheme operates on a store-by-store basis. Just because a Starbucks in one part of London, or even one part of a borough, allows the public to use their toilets, that doesn’t mean that others do, unfortunately.

We have also written an inclusive design guide called Publicly Accessible Toilets aimed at providers (including local authorities), other professionals involved in the provision of publicly accessible toilets (e.g stations, department stores, or shopping centres) and may also be of interest to campaigners or the general public.

Publicly Accessible Toilets: An Inclusive Design Guide can be downloaded as a PDF here. We have hard copies available for free! Please email us if you would like to be sent a copy.

Gail has put together a list of other public toilet-related reports and publications on her blog, ‘Public Toilets and…’.

Here are a few:

• It’d be good if the map was nationwide;
• It would be good if it showed all publicly accessible toilets (like those in Tesco), not just those provided by local authorities;
• It would be good if users could add/correct data that is then passed on to the data provider;
• It would be good to feed council data to OpenStreetMap, and vice-versa;
• It would be good to have a mobile version of the site, or an app;
• It would be good to refine the search to only show certain toilets, e.g. ‘wheelchair accessible’, ‘open now’;
• It would be good to have more information about each toilet, e.g. step-free, or link to an image from Google StreetView;
• It would be good to print a map of an area, with toilet details, for people to keep and use.

If you think of any more please let us know at toiletmap@rca.ac.uk and we’ll add them to this list.

New ideas:

• It would be good to colour-code the arrows to show the different types of toilet.