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"This map shows the global distribution of geo-located entities described in Freebase, a collaborative knowledge base that defines itself as “an open shared database of the world’s knowledge”. Freebase forms one of the key informational ingredients in Google’s Knowledge Graph. If you’ve ever looked at the side panel in Google’s search results page, which presents information about people, places, and events in response to a search query, then you’ve probably come into contact with data stored in Freebase.... Geographic content in Freebase is largely clustered in certain regions of the world. The United States accounts for over 45% of the overall number of place names in the collection, despite covering about 2% of the Earth, less than 7% of the land surface, and less than 5% of the world population, and about 10% of Internet users. This results in a US density of one Freebase place name for every 1500 people, and far more place names referring to Massachusetts than referring to China. A third of all place names are geo-located in Europe.... This stands in contrast to countries like China that account for less than 1% of the collection (with less than 4000 place names, and a density of only one place name for every 300,000 inhabitants). Most of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean are similarly underrepresented... Outside Europe and North America, only four countries (Australia, China, India, and Japan) are represented with more content than Antarctica (in part because the database contains descriptions of hundreds of Antarctic mountains and ranges).... Because Freebase is a core ingredient in the informational menu presented to us by the world’s most widely used search engine, these presences and absences have the potential to have a significant impact on how we understand, interact with, and create our world. Freebase may seem like a small corner of the Web, but the imbalances that we observe in it can have large reverberations through the broader information ecosystems accessed by billions of people."
Source: Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, England (UK)
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