A point can be mapped into different coordinate systems using matrix multiplications.
Let's follow a box through the coordinate systems it has to go through to be displayed on your monitor.
The box starts in the local space. It can be helpful to imagine that this is a space where only vertices of the box exist, and their coordinates are all relative to its origin (0, 0, 0).
When we hard-coded a triangle's vertices like below:
float vertices[] = {
-0.5f, -0.5f, 0.0f,
0.5f, -0.5f, 0.0f,
0.0f, 0.5f, 0.0f
};