The divisions of the world, recognized. e.g., as place names, landmarks, rasters, polygons, reporting zones, tessellations, etc. 'At the centre of all spatial analysis is the concept of place. The Earth's surface comprises some 500,000,000 sq km, so there would be room to pack half a billion industrial sites of 1 sq km each (assuming that nothing else required space, and that the two-thirds of the Earth's surface that is covered by water was as acceptable as the one-third that is land); and 500 trillion sites of 1 sq m each (roughly the space occupied by a sleeping human). People identify with places of various sizes and shapes, from the room to the parcel of land, to the neighborhood, the city, the county, the state or province, or the nation-state. Places may overlap, as when a watershed spans the boundary of two counties, and places may be nested hierarchically, as when counties combine to form a state or province.' For more information, see
http://www.spatialanalysisonline.com/output/
