Six hundred and a little kilometers south of the city of Accra (the capital of Ghana), two conventional lines intersect in the middle of the Gulf of Guinea — the equator and the international reference meridian. This is the “Zero Island”, a point with coordinates of 0° north latitude and 0° degrees east longitude. There is nothing there, just an ocean almost five kilometers deep and a meteorological buoy with the code name “Soul”. But this is only in reality, the virtual space — information — at this point contains millions of objects, there is an active economic activity, and every user of the Network has been there at least once. Naked Science tells how it happened and why non-existent geodata have become a problem for all mankind.
Have you ever met a mapping application, widget or frame on a website that is centered by default on a certain point in the Atlantic Ocean near the coast of Africa? Try to strain your memory — this almost certainly happened. But even if it didn’t work out personally, you visited the “Zero Island” and, most likely, more than once. Perhaps not entirely (a complete set of personal data), but some part of your “digital identity”. For example, uploading photos to the Network that do not have shooting coordinates in the metadata. If the portal supports image geolocation search, there is a high probability that such files will “end up” on the map in the Gulf of Guinea. Because database creators too often do not provide for the correct processing of missing data and simply replace NULL with zero.
Strictly speaking, this is where the original English name of the “Zero Island” comes from
Null Island. And it is more correct to translate it as “Island Zero”, but it does not sound as weighty as the Naked Science variant (fortunately, the term is not so well-established, so we have the right). For the first time, it was introduced into the use of specialists in geoinformation systems by Tableau analyst Steve Pellegrin in 2008. Since then, the “Zero Island” has gone through several stages of popularization — from an internal joke of employees of one company, to an element of slang of IT specialists related to geocoding, and then entered the culture. At the same time, the importance of the virtual point is growing every year, so it’s time to look at Null Island from a scientific point of view.
The first full-fledged work on this topic was carried out by Levente Juhasz from Florida International University (FIU) and Peter Mooney from the Irish National University in Maynooth (NUIM). The researchers analyzed a huge amount of open sources that mention Null Island, a point with coordinates of 0° north latitude and 0° degrees east longitude, or other “stubs” of missing geodata (both in other scientific papers and professional literature, and directly in geoinformation systems). In addition, Juhas and Mooney evaluated the contents of the “Zero Island” for the first time, showing what data appears in these coordinates. They have not yet published their work in a peer-reviewed journal, but they have already posted a preprint on the arXiv portal.
The first full-fledged work on this topic was carried out by Levente Juhasz from Florida International University (FIU) and Peter Mooney from the Irish National University in Maynooth (NUIM). The researchers analyzed a huge amount of open sources that mention Null Island, a point with coordinates of 0° north latitude and 0° degrees east longitude, or other “stubs” of missing geodata (both in other scientific papers and professional literature, and directly in geoinformation systems). In addition, Juhas and Mooney evaluated the contents of the “Zero Island” for the first time, showing what data appears in these coordinates. They have not yet published their work in a peer-reviewed journal, but they have already posted a preprint on the arXiv portal.
