Museums — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each dot is a museum. There are more than 105,000 worldwide. Colour represents the subject the museum covers, and the size of a dot represents the footprint of the building. Click on any of them to see what OpenStreetMap records, such as who runs it, whether it charges for entry and the year it opened. If there's a Wikipedia article, we show a short summary and a link to the full article, in your own language where possible.

Where the data comes from

Every museum here is something a mapper added at the OpenStreetMap website, from a survey, from local knowledge or from a building they walked past. We don't model or estimate anything ourselves, and we haven't merged in any national register of museums.

What we include

We use one exact tag, `tourism=museum`. It covers a national institution, a one-room local collection in a converted cottage and an open-air museum spread over a hillside, all under the same name. A commercial gallery carries a different tag and sits on the art galleries layer instead, although mappers do not always draw that line the same way.

Colour

Colour represents the subject, and about one museum in five records what its subject is. The other four are drawn in grey. Grey is a real class here, and it means nobody wrote the subject down rather than that the museum has an unusual one. Ten subjects have a colour of their own, and they are the commonest ones: history, local history, art, transport, science and technology, natural history, a single person, archaeology, military history, and open-air or living history museums. Everything else shares one colour, because a legend can only carry so many classes before it stops being readable. We fold near-synonyms together before drawing the map, so a geology or palaeontology museum is coloured as natural history, and railways, ships, aircraft and cars all count as transport. Click a museum to see the value OpenStreetMap actually holds.

Entry charges and opening hours

We show whether a museum charges for entry where OpenStreetMap records it, which is on about a fifth of them. That was what the tag said when we took this copy of the map, so check with the museum before you travel. We do not show opening hours at all, although OpenStreetMap holds them for more than a quarter of these museums. They are written in a compact machine syntax that we would have to interpret and rewrite in each language, and showing the raw text would be worse than showing nothing.

Size

The size of a dot represents the footprint of the museum in square metres. Many museums are mapped as a single point with no outline, and we draw those at one nominal size rather than the smallest one, so for a large part of this map the size is not telling you how big the museum is. Footprint is a weak guide to what a museum holds in any case, because a small building can house a major collection, and an open-air museum covers ground rather than rooms. We cap the size scale below the largest open-air sites so that ordinary museums stay distinguishable from one another.

Where the map is empty

An empty area means nobody has mapped a museum there, not that a place has none. Mapping is more complete in western and central Europe and other well mapped regions than in lower income countries, so a dense patch shows you a well mapped place before it shows you a museum-rich one.

Up to date, mostly

OpenStreetMap is edited continuously, and we take a new copy once every one to three months. A museum shown here may have closed, and a closed museum often keeps its building for years.

Source and licence

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