Null Island is a fictional island in the Gulf of Guinea added to the Natural Earth public domain map dataset, located where the equator crosses the prime meridian, at coordinates 0°N 0°E. Although intended humorously, the fiction has a serious purpose and is used by mapping systems to trap errors. Such errors arise, for example, where an image artifact is erroneously associated to the location by software which cannot attribute a geo-position, and instead associates a latitude and longitude of "Null,Null" or "0,0". Null Island was developed as an idea in 2011 or slightly earlier. Since then, numerous web pages have documented this fictional landmass's flag, geography, and history.