Concepts and Terms
The terms below are used in the Booking, Validation and Display APIs. They are specific to Lineberty's Queue Management Solution.
Companies and Places
See the Resources pages of Booking API and Validation API.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Company | The Company associated to the API Key. There can be several companies associated to the same API Key (e.g., one per country, or one per district in a same country), differentiated by their ID. |
| Place | A place managed by the Company. There can be several places managed by the same Company, differentiated by their ID. A place can be a shop, a monument, a museum, an amusement park, etc. |
| Subplace | A subdivision of the places. They are identified by their ID. |
| Category | Categories group together a set of queues and belong to a place, or a sub-place. |
| Queue | The virtual queue containing tickets. |
| Endpoint | A shop, a corner, a counter in an agency, an attraction in a park,... i.e. any place where the Lineberty Solution is deployed. |
Users and Operators
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| User | The person who books a ticket, receives notifications, and gets called on a screen, i.e. the end user of the Booking API. This may be a customer in a shop, a visitor in a leisure park or a cultural place, or anyone with an appointment. |
| Operator | The person of the Company (salespeople, cashiers, hosts/hostesses) who uses the Validation API and operates to move people through the virtual queue. |
Queuing and Booking Terms
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Booking | The operation performed by the User via the application to get an appointment at a given time at the endpoint. See the Booking API. |
| FIFO | First In First Out. The first ticket in the queue gets called first. The user may pass earlier or later than the time initially scheduled. |
| Appointment | The date and time when it will be the user's turn. The user will pass at the time that was scheduled when booking, or later, but never earlier. |
| Appointment Types | The motives for queuing. For each reason for a user's visit, a duration is configured. The duration of the ticket depends on this reason and the number of people (group size) associated with the ticket. |
| Availability | The time periods during which it is possible to book a ticket. The availabilities can be either for the current day, or the next days. |
| Actions on a Ticket | Actions made by the user on her/his ticket, such as canceling, postponing, rating. Operator can perform actions on ticket too, such as changing a ticket state, or recalling a ticket. There may also be automatic actions launched by triggers. |
| Eligibility | If a user is allowed to book a ticket, depending on the time, her/his GPS position, or the tickets s/he already booked. |
| Counters | A system in the Booking and Validation APIs to count tickets and/or people, for example those who enter the place. |
| SSE | Server Side Event. ⇾ SSE requests allow to get a list from the server in real time. SSE Requests in the Booking and Validation APIs allow to get realtime information on each new event. |
| Validation | The operations performed by the Operator on tickets and queues. See the Validation API. |
| Notification | A message sent by Lineberty to the company's server and forwarded to the Booking application by push, whenever an action is performed on a ticket. The subscription to the notification service is done directly when booking the ticket and for each ticket. |
Lineberty Specifics
Extended Attributes
These fields are configured by Lineberty on customer demand. They allow storing different types of information on each ticket then displaying them on the validation interface to provide more information to the operators.
The extended attributes are configurated at the queue level, which means that all tickets of a same queue share the same attributes, but the values of these attributes are bound to one ticket only. In other words, Lineberty defines the list of possible fields as well as their validation rules at the queue level, while the values are stored on the tickets.
It is then possible to use these extended attributes to perform searches and other actions in the validation API (depends on the Operator's role). They are also used for reporting in the Lineberty Management Console.
Time Slots
| Booking time slots vs. Endpoint opening hours |
According to Oxford Languages, a time slot is "A length of time allotted to someone or something".
In the Lineberty APIs, this term is used either to designate the time slots during which tickets can be booked (booking time slots), or the opening hours of the endpoint (during which the tickets will be validated by operators). These two time periods are not necessarily concomitant.
For example, the opening hours of an endpoint can be defined as a time period between 9 a.m to 4 p.m, but the period of time during which the booking will be possible could be defined as a time slot between 7 a.m to 10 a.m.