Question: I'm wondering if there is a service that to get a set of lat,long points that when connected into a polygon show the outline of a country

Ideally I would like to search by country, and get back an array of lat,long coordinates. Is there such a service?

Answer: 
IF you are happy to consider not using a webservice, this data is available at varying resolutions from [Natural Earth](http://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/). The data is in the [public domain](http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/).
[Yahoo! GeoPlanet](http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/geoplanet/), the service Stack Overflow are using [for their careers site](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/46433/france-is-not-within-30-miles-of-london) seems to do bounding boxes.

Here is a [blog post with detailed query examples](http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2010/08/showing_world_with_yql/).