1. I support Gregor's call to internationalize the name of the "county" DwC element, although I do not have a strong opinion on the name or definition.
2. One reason why I don't have strong opinions about the location terms at various levels is that I think in the future they will become increasingly irrelevant. A GPS-derived decimal latitude and decimal longitude effectively serves as a GUID for locality. If a record has a decimal latitude and longitude it should be possible (and in many cases already IS possible) to determine all of the other geographic elements (continent, country, stateProvince, etc.) from the decimal latitude and longitude using software, and with a suitably accurate digital elevation model to determine the elevation for surface records as well. The only other element that is really important is the "terminal (most specific) named area" which is not likely to be something like a political subdivision that can be computer-derivable. It is more likely to be something like "west side of Smith's quarry" or "Jonesville Community Park" - something that would be useful to place the GPS coordinates in a local context. Until I read this thread it was never clear to me that this is what dwcterms:locality meant and I think that people have been using it in a variety of ways. Perhaps the name should be changed to make it more clear that locality means the lowest level rather than something more generic.
Steve Baskauf