The operation of a network of sensing devices on a global scale requires an architecture to support efficient node registration and querying across billions, if not trillions of nodes. Whilst our work to date has concentrated on the development of a worldwide sensor Web framework, a global data collection network architecture could also be applied to any effort involving data retrieval from geographically identifiable nodes. The paper presents a new network architecture, overlaid onto the fabric of the Internet, to support the efficient registration and querying of geographically based nodes on a global scale.