Prioritizing or ordering query results

[Jeff Schnitzer]

I'm trying to create an interface that shows a handful of places on a
map, constrained by the viewport. It would display the "top ten"
places in the area you are examining, then as you zoom out, some (or
perhaps all) points would disappear and be replaced by others with a
higher priority. Wikimapia works roughly like this - as you zoom in
you get the less significant placemarks.

At an API level, what I'm looking for is:

* The ability to assign a priority to placemarks.
* The ability to query for placemarks in a bounding box (or radius),
ordered by the priority.

Is it possible to do this with GeoAPI? I don't see anything about
priorities or ordering in the API. Is anything like this planned?

Thanks,
Jeff