Places in GeoPlanet are coarsely represented in Longitude/Latitude coordinates using the WGS84 datum. We have chosen to represent all places within a single positional context to ensure that content is organized in a consistent way globally. GeoPlanet also recognizes that a place has a center and an area of influence and represents these respectively by its centroid and its bounding box. Thus every place within each theme has a geometric description. Different areas within different themes overlap to enable the most granular location for an address to be found.
We provide coordinates where available; some entities in GeoPlanet may not have coordinates, but these can usually be derived from the parent and child geometries.
GeoPlanet is not a feature server. The coordinates it provides are illustrative, not normative; we do not aim to be the authority on the exact bounds of any particular place (and leave this debate to others). Our concern is instead to provide a common naming convention, and to ensure that places are correctly represented in relation to each other in a global, consistent framework. In practice this means that we are not in a position to claim that a particular neighborhood stops at one block and starts at the next, only that the concept of that neighborhood be identified consistently. Our primary concerns are relative -- not absolute -- geography, and the semantics of place.