Points of Interest and client locations

Points of Interest and client locations are used together to determine if customers are located near relevant places, such as store locations.

Location sources

Location sources are used to determine the location of a stores and customer. They are responsible for generating client location records and sending them to the Location component. For example, devices such as a GPS-enabled mobile device, that can detect a client's geographic location or proximity to a point of interest.

The Location component can collect types of geographic location information from several sources, including:

World Geodetic System

The WGS 84 World Geodetic System is used when expressing geographic locations. Each geographic location includes the following information:

Latitude: The location latitude, in degrees.
Longitude: The location longitude, in degrees.
Altitude: The location altitude or height, if available, in meters.

W3C Geolocation

The W3C Geolocation API is used to include the following information:

Accuracy: The horizontal accuracy, in meters.
Altitude Accuracy: The vertical accuracy, in meters.
Heading: The direction of travel, in degrees.
Speed: The ground speed, in meters per second.

Points of Interest

Points of Interest are predefined geographic locations such as a geographic regions or store locations.

Marketing managers can create location-based marketing activities to deliver location-based content and rewards to customers, according to your business needs.

Customers with GPS-enabled mobile devices can receive location-based content and rewards using location-based services. For example, customers can view store flyers in mobile starter stores for nearby store locations. In addition, customers can check in to nearby store locations on their mobile devices to receive rewards such as coupons. When there are multiple store locations within the given area, the precedence value is looked up to decide which store to return.

The following reference information is available for Points of Interest:

POINTOFINTEREST

This database table stores the Points of Interest locations. For example, a point of interest can be a region or store location.

POIDESC

This database table stores the Points of Interest descriptions.

PointOfInterest (PointOfInterest.xsd)

This is the name of the OAGIS noun for Points of Interest.

pointOfInterest (rest-pointofinterest-clientobjects.xml)

This is the name of the REST services resource for Points of Interest.

For example:


{
pointOfInterestId: 10001,
identifier: 'Markville Mall Store',
type: 'Store',
storeId: 10001,
regionId: 'CA-ON',
zoneId: 'Markville Mall Store',
latitude: 43.889,
longitude: -79.290,
radius: 500,
precedence: 1
}

When a client location record is sent to the Location component, its Point of Interest ID is either specified by the location source or resolved from its geographic location.

Note: Points of Interest in the Location component and store locations in the Store Locator component are managed separately.

Client locations

Client locations are a customer's location at a specific point in time. They are generated by location sources and sent to the Location component for processing.

Important: The Location component does not act as a location data repository. It only persists the last known location of a client.

The following reference information is available for client locations:

CLIENTLOCATION

This database table stores the location definition of a client. For example, a client location can be the location of a customer.

ClientLocation (ClientLocation.xsd)

This is the name of the OAGIS noun for client locations.

clientLocation (rest-clientlocation-clientobjects.xml)

This is the name of the REST services resource for client resources.

For example:


{
clientLocationId: 10001,
clientType: 'User',
sourceType: 'GPS',
clientId: 10001,
personalizationId: 10001,
storeId: 10001,
pointOfInterestId: 10001,
action: 'Check-in',
creationTime: '2012-01-01T00:00:00.000Z'
}

Sample XML and XSD file locations

The sample XML files are located in:

LocationServicesRESTInterface.war

The sample XSD files are located in:

Location-DataObject.jar

Sample Data Load values

HCL Commerce provides sample points of interest data that can be loaded into the database using the Data Load utility.

The sample loads point of interest locations into the POINTOFINTEREST table and point of interest descriptions into the POIDESC table.

See Sample: Loading point of interest (POI) data for more information.