“80% of All Information is Geospatially Referenced”??? Towards a Research Framework: Using the Semantic Web for (In)Validating this Famous Geo Assertion

The assertion that 80% of all information has some geographic reference is quite famous amongst geoscientists. It has been repeatedly stated in numerous publications with plenty of modifications, e.g.: “eighty to ninety percent of all the information collected and used was related to geography” (Huxhold 1991: 22–23), “as much as 80% of all information held by business and government may be geographically referenced” (Franklin 1992: 12), “research shows that approximately 80% of all decisions in the public sector are based on georeferenced data” (Riecken 2001: 218) and “95% is more accurate today, new technology is partially responsible, including cell phones, GPS devices and electronic toll collectors” (Perkins 2010). Authors generally do not mention the methodology of the statistics and refer either to previous academic or to other non-academic sources. Franklin cites an annual report of the Ohio Geographically Referenced Information Program (OGRIP 1990) and Huxhold mentions a brochure of the Municipality of Burnaby, Canada (Municipality of Burnaby 1986). The only study that reports a method is Sussmann (1993). Here entities of all databases of the Canadian City of Scarborough were counted and it was found that 28% of all entities were stored within the 4 GIS databases of the in total 11 databases. Nevertheless even this publication concludes that “the municipal data model in Scarborough demonstrated that over 80% of all data could be associated with geography” without justifying how this number was generated. In a blog comment, Bob Gaspirc, who was a member of the Toronto Municipal Atlas Group in 1983, claims himself to be one of the original sources of this quote and mentions that it was basically invented for cost justification of IT hardware (Gaspirc 2010). Today the thesis can still be read in research contexts – “According to the generally accepted assertion that 80% of all information has a reference to space” (Fitzke and Greve 2010: 735) – and hence has become a kind of truism in geographic information science. The objective of this paper is to introduce a research framework that aims to prove or disprove this famous assertion. For this purpose we will first look at the definition of the terms spatial and geospatial reference from a state-of-the-art perspective. Section 3 describes the foundations of the Semantic Web, which will be used as a tool for validation or invalidation. Section 4 presents the actual approach and shows figures that visualise it. This is followed by a preliminary results section based on a small dataset to exemplify the approach. In the last section we present detailed research questions for the topic, which need to be addressed in our future work.