Difference between journey and location

Explanation on the differences between what you see on the journey and location tab of a tracker.

What you seen when clicking the Journey or Location tab of a single asset is different. The differences between both are described in the table below.

Table 1. Comparison between journey and location tab
Journey tab Location tab
Available for what tracker? Trackers with start-stop (movement) profiles All trackers
Shows what type of location updates? Start, stops and On The Moves All locations
Time-related information Time stopped

Time moving

 Location recording time
Filtering options Group short activities at the same location Group nearby locations

Location trigger updates

Location source
Goal Insights on where an asset stopped and for how long Insights in locations of the tracker and analysis of the working of the tracker

Journey and locations of BLE tags

What is shown in the journey and location tabs for BLE tags are very different from the connected trackers. For now, journeys of BLE tags are only shown when they are scanned by vehicle trackers or Zebra mobile app devices. When BLE tags are seen by zone anchors, nothing will be shown in the journeys. As this is still work in progress, this will still change in the next months. Take a look tat the localizaton for BLE tag tracker to get more insights on their working.

Q&A on journeys, locations and tracker locations

Why do I see a different location in my tracker journey then on "the current location" of my tracker on the asset status page?

Here under we shortly explain the logic used to determine whether a new location is used to update the tracker current location. Although we try to make the user experience as consistent as possible, when you take a look at the different ways the location messages are shown on the platform, you might find it inconsistent.

Depending on the abstraction level you look into the location messages, you can look up locations in:

  • The device messages (message type: location_update): here there are many locations flowing in with various accuracies and timestamps.

  • The journey here only locations which are motion related are shown: stop, start and on-the-moves.

  • Tracker current locations: some of the above locations are used to update the tracker current location.

For the tracker current location, the goal is to show the best possible location of the tracker at this point. That means that for a message to be taken into account for being a location update:

  • the location should be more recent that the current tracker location

  • a precise location (ble/gps/wifi) always wins from a network location

  • if the platform already has a precise location of a tracker, it will only let the network location take over if it is more than 200km away from the current location of the tracker

  • if the current location is a network location a new network location always wins