Yahoo! aims to capture the geography of the Earth as it is used by the world's people. To this end we are guided by various standards and sources of geographical information. For country codes and names, we rely on ISO 3166-1 but make no specific claim as to official designation or authority of disputed territories.
We appreciate that the subjective and personal nature of world geography ensures that there is no single authoritative hierarchy and we do not aim to impose one here. Rather, the GeoPlanet hierarchy is presented to facilitate geographic discovery, and ultimately assist in disambiguating identically named places, and resolving spatial appellations to a unique, open, and permanent identifier.