Yahoo! GeoPlanet is UTF-8 compliant and supports location names for usage variations and in multiple languages, including English, French, German, Italian, Spanish as well as local double-byte character set data in Japanese, Traditional Chinese, and Korean.
Yahoo! GeoPlanet aims to capture all forms of how a place is called. For example, 'München' in Germany is 'Munich' to the English speaking world and 'Monaco di Bavaria' to the Italians, but may also be keyed as 'Muenchen' and 'Munchen' if special characters, diacritic marks, and ligatures are not available to the user. All of these spatial appellations are simply multiple names for the same place, and therefore reside within GeoPlanet mapped to the same WOEID (676757).