Introducing Real-Time Check-In for Efficient Location Tagging

Are you sure you don’t want to introduce a check-in button feature where the user can add a location point in realtime instead of manually having to go back at a later stage to reassign the correct location?

It take so much effort to go and clean up the timelines on long day trips with lots of locations its just not worth the time and effort to manually split walks and then manually added points of interest.

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Typically the current visit should be visible in the timeline within 2-3 minutes of arrival. So you can confirm/correct the place assignment within a few minutes of arrival, which is semi real time.

The problem with doing it any earlier than that is the timeline processing will still be “live”, with potentially changes still being made to the current item, such that might be a different item shortly after.

For example, let’s say you arrive at a building’s parking area, park your car/bicycle/etc, then walk into the building. The current item will initially be the parking area, then within a couple of minutes the current item will be a walking item, then it’ll change again to the building itself once you arrive. If you tried to “check in” at the first place you stopped, ie the parking area, it’d be assigning a Place to the wrong Visit, and you’d have to do it again shortly after.

Arc/LocoKit has 3 classifications for timeline items: invalid, valid, and keeper. For visit items, we can ignore “invalid”; for “valid” it needs to be at least 10 seconds; for “keeper” it needs to be at least 2 minutes long. Visit items that haven’t reached that “keeper” threshold yet are subject to merging/deletion, so aren’t really worth assigning a Place to yet.

That said, I’m not totally against the idea! It would just have to be done in such a way that … well, it would need to be a bit smarter than just assigning a Place to the current Visit. If it were done in that simple way, it wouldn’t work a lot of the time.

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I support this feature. No matter what smart way the Arc is using, it all rely on GPS and other signals. So once a signal not sure it is and a Stationary might changed to car, bus, walking etc. So this feature can help a lot when I have a travel day that have so much point to split. Like in a Mountain with viewpoint. Vertically it might have the same horizontal location and different viewpoint name.