[Coco Krumme, one of our awesome data team, wrote the following about locations that are listed in Freebase. Jonathan will be talking more about this at Where2.0 on Wednesday afternoon.]

This world map was created using only Freebase data: every Freebase city, town, island, national park, business, landmark and person with a geolocation (latitude and longitude) has been plotted as a point using Quantum GIS, an open source visualization tool.

(click the image to see it full-sized.)

Most of the continental outlines come from city data, the majority of it pulled from Wikipedia. Heavier fills in the United States and Europe indicate locations where – not surprisingly, given Wikipedia’s superior coverage in the US, UK, and Italy— more landmarks or businesses have been tagged with a latitude and longitude.

Compare this map to the population density map below. The overall patterns are similar: countries with a high density of people also tend to have a high density of cities. But the exceptions are revealing: on the Freebase map, China is barely visible, even though its population density (especially that of Eastern China) rivals that of Western Europe.

(Image from Wikimedia Commons; click through for larger image and more details.)

The Freebase map also gives a better sense of where cities or landmarks (and thus, people) are concentrated within a country. Note the differences in the two Brazils, United States and Australias, for example. And Antarctica shows up in the first map for its landmarks, while its dearth of humans excludes it from the second.