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Now it's been 3 days I am using Mapinfo and it has Y as latitude and X as longitude. Is that the same case for all mapping software? As for any country their respective value is multiple of 1 or -1. So for Nepal can I say it is on positive side +1 for both latitude and longitude? And for USA to be +1 Y and -1 X.

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Latitude is the Y axis, longitude is the X axis. Since latitude can be positive and negative (north and south of the Equator), and longitude can be as well (negative west of Greenwich and positive eastward) when the -180 to +180 longitude system is use. Hence the four combinations of positive and negative are possible depending upon where you are located on the globe. – Dan Patterson Jun 29 '11 at 22:19
Thanks @Dan Patterson – Kitex Jun 29 '11 at 22:39
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You will appreciate an earlier thread that discusses this question more generally: gis.stackexchange.com/questions/6037/…. – whuber♦ Jun 29 '11 at 22:46
Thank you very much for link ! Well I am studying :) – Kitex Jun 29 '11 at 23:03
+1 for the link nice one @whuber – Kitex Jun 29 '11 at 23:25

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No, for example when talking to a GeoServer WFS (or any other compliant WFS) the axis order depends on if you ask for version 1.0 or 1.1 of the spec in EPSG:4326.

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Could you please elaborate ? – Kitex Jun 29 '11 at 22:39
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The original spec had longitude,latitude order. This is more of a software-oriented view as it matches up with [US-centric] x,y order. This doesn't match the ISO standard, so various later specs have changed the order to latitude,longitude. This order should be used when displaying or transmitting the values, they don't have to be stored that way. Not everyone uses x,y as the labels for easting,northing. Some people use y=easting,x=northing. For projected data, the coordinate reference system defn should specify the axis order and labels. – mkennedy Jun 30 '11 at 0:43

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