[routing-wg] Who uses the RIPE IRR and for what?

I did a little experiment yesterday.  I fetched the entire ripe.db.route
file from the ripe.net FTP server and for each route specified in that
file (a total of 245,890 routes) I extracted the base IPv4 address of
the route and then looked that address up within the asn.routeviews.org
DNS zone, which is kindly provided by the Routeviews Project at the
Advanced Network Technology Center at the University of Oregon.  That
DNS zone allows users to quickly find the _actual_ route and ASN that
is currently associated with any given IPv4 address.

The results of my little experiment are simple to summarize.

10,829 of the base addresses listed in the ripe.db.route file are not
actually being routed at the present time (at least they weren't,
yesterday, at the time I ran this analysis).

Of the remaining 235,061 route base IP addresses, fully 28,988 of
those (12.3%) are being announced by some AS other than the one
specified in the ripe.db.route file.

My results file is available here:

   ftp://ftp.tristatelogic.com/pub/ripe.db.route.routecheck

In that file, any line containing only one field -is- being routed
and -is- being routed by the AS specified in the ripe.db.route file.

Lines in the results file with contain exactly two whitspace separated
fields are not currently being routed.

Lines in the results file that contain exactly three whitspace separated
fields are being routed by some AS other than the one called for within
the ripe.db.route file.  In these cases, field #1 is the route from the
ripe.db.route file, field #2 is the AS number from the ripe.db.route file,
and field #3 is the ASN that is _actually_ routing the base IP address at
the present time (as of yesterday).

Given the considerable number of routing anomalies revealed by my simple
experiment, I am inclined to wonder who is actually using all of that
route information in the RIPE DB, and what on earth they could be using
it for.

If anyone could enlighten me on this point, I would appreciate it.