The hamlets feature class is a point dataset containing named places for the main purpose of cartography. The original feature class only contained names within Peel Region and almost exclusively focused on the names of former villages and towns in the Region. This new, expanded feature class still contains these locales, but now includes administrative names and locales inside and outside of Peel Region.
The feature class schema was expanded and made to allow the addition of other types of named places in the future, such as natural features like peaks or geologic formations (i.e. Niagara Escarpment) if needed. It also provides more methods for querying different features through several categories and hierarchies that should help provide scale-based querying and styling.
The main purpose of this dataset is for use in labelling (cartography) and shouldn't be taken to be exhaustive or exact.