Geographic coordinate system
A geographic coordinate system is a coordinate system that enables every location on the Earth to be specified by a set of numbers and/or letters. The coordinates are often chosen such that one of the numbers represents vertical position, and two or three of the numbers represent horizontal position. A common choice of coordinates is latitude, longitude and elevation.
Latitude and longitude values can be based on different geodetic systems or datums, the most common being WGS 84, a global datum used by all GPS equipment. The coordinates of features on Google Maps are the GPS coordinates based on the WGS 84 datum.
Other datums are significant because they were chosen by a national cartographical organisation as the best method for representing their region, and these are the datums used on printed maps.
In popular GIS software, data projected in latitude/longitude is often represented as a 'Geographic Coordinate System'. For example, data in latitude/longitude if the datum is the North American Datum of 1983 is denoted by 'GCS North American 1983'.