About PublicToilet.dk — methodology and limitations
Last updated: 2026-09-09
DanskWhat this service is
PublicToilet.dk answers one urgent question quickly: where is the nearest public toilet, and is it open? The service launched with open-data coverage of Copenhagen and Frederiksberg and grows municipality by municipality.
Everything you see is grounded in named sources. Every facility page states which source described it and how fresh that information is. We never present a guess as a fact.
Where the data comes from
Listings are built from one or more data sources. When sources overlap we apply a fixed priority, field by field:
- Municipal open-data feeds — today the City of Copenhagen’s two toilet inventories and Frederiksberg’s continuously updated register.
- GeoFA, the shared Danish municipal facility registry (planned; nationwide gap coverage).
- OpenStreetMap (planned; gap coverage and complementary details, under the ODbL licence).
- Moderated visitor reports — your corrections and confirmations, reviewed by a human before they change anything.
Freshness and confidence
Municipal feeds are re-imported automatically — daily for the Copenhagen TMF inventory and Frederiksberg, weekly for Copenhagen’s other administrations. Imports are content-hashed, so a listing’s freshness follows the source’s own last change, not our download time.
Every facility carries one of five confidence labels, computed from source reliability, agreement between sources, explicit status, parseable opening hours, and freshness:
- Official and recently updated — an official record in good standing: explicit status, parseable opening hours, recent enough data.
- Official, but some details are unknown — official data, but status, hours, or agreement between sources leaves some details unknown.
- Community mapped — community-contributed information rather than an official feed.
- Recently confirmed by a visitor — a visitor confirmation was moderated within the last 60 days.
- May be outdated — the record is stale (no source change for over 180 days) or carries a credible closure report; check before relying on it.
Limitations — what we honestly do not know
Unknown stays unknown. If no source states opening hours, accessibility or fees, we show “unknown” — never a default, never a guess. A facility with unknown hours is never counted as “open now”, and accessibility is only claimed where a source states it.
The Copenhagen TMF inventory is an aggregated table: one point can bundle several physical toilets, and a handful of records carry internally inconsistent status text (for example both in operation and permanently closed). We import these with warnings and resolve them to the most usable status rather than silently dropping them.
Coverage today is Copenhagen and Frederiksberg only. The nationwide sources (GeoFA, OpenStreetMap) are planned and will extend coverage gradually — their field completeness varies, and that will not be hidden when they arrive.
Spotted an error? Tell us
Every facility page has a report-an-issue link. Reports are anonymous and moderated by a human before they change our data; you can optionally leave an email if you are willing to be contacted for follow-up. The privacy policy states exactly what a report stores.