Quick Read. A useful AI city record cannot be CITY NAME + FACTS. It needs identity, boundary, time, relations, confidence and contradiction handling.

Minimum high-definition city record

• Stable ID and aliases.
• Country / sovereignty relation, including contested relations where required.
• Object type: administrative city, urban centre, metro, functional area or historical settlement.
• Coordinates and spatial reference.
• Authority: who legally governs and who practically controls.
• Functions: political, commercial, port, industrial, religious, educational or other centralities.
• Dependencies: water, food, energy, labour, data and transport.
• Evidence date and confidence.
• Failure substitutes.
• Parent and peer routes.

Three prohibitions

• Never attach a statistic without the boundary that generated it.
• Never turn a political claim into uncontested geography.
• Never assume the capital is the largest or dominant commercial city.

World return

The representation must remain correctable by reality. If governance changes, a capital moves, a metro expands or a conflict changes territorial control, update the relation rather than rewriting the city’s entire historical identity.

Use How City Boundaries Mislead Us, How Contested Capital Cities Work and How Cities Work as companion routes.