Why are interests relevant?
Interests are the essential elements to create situational awareness for your company’s needs and interests. They provide the internal context required to focus your monitoring, alert systems or analytics on what matters most.
The more accurate data you provide to visualize your company’s interests the better you will be able to SEE and UNDERSTAND whether events unfolding may or may not be relevant to your company. You will be able to setup interest-based alerts to stay informed at all times. Also, you will use interests for (security) planning, e.g. to assess the risks to a planned new location or travel destination based on the event history in the area and probably more in-depth analysis from our UNDERSTAND section.
What qualifies as an interest?
Interest – often also referred to as assets - can be any locations, routes, areas or topics that are significant to your operations. Interests can include HQs or offices, specific areas, routes, projects, supplier or customer locations, traveler locations, hotels, airports, supply routes, and more. Once interests are established, you can set up proximity alerts based on them.
Topics of interest you can monitor using a keyword and/or category only approach.
How do I create an interest?
You can create interests either manually or by using Excel:
Manually
Move the map to the desired location or just use the “search location” bar to find the desired location. Right-click on the map, then select depending on your type of interest you want to create “Add point/area/line or interest.” Customize your interest by choosing an icon, name, and tag. See below for more details on what each interest type. Your create “Routes” of interest with the route planner in the “Layer” menu.
Excel import
Download the Excel template and enter all your interests as specified. Once updated, upload the Excel file, and your interests will be added to the system. Note: 📝 When importing interests using Excel, pay close attention to document coordinates consistently in either “latitude, longitude” or “longitude, latitude” and choose the applicable format when importing. Incorrectly ordered coordinates can result in your interests being placed in the wrong locations on the map, which can lead to inaccurate data visualization and alerts. |
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Important Note: 📝 As a managed service Creolytix is happy to support you with structuring (tags) and importing your interest data, including from your company databases or other tools. Just reach out to your personal contact.
Types of interests and when to use them
You can choose to create interests from various types depending what fits your purpose best:
Points
Choose “Point” to mark a specific, singular point on the map for visualization or monitoring. These can include important sites like your offices, warehouses, projects, hotels or airports, supplier locations or any pinpointed location relevant to your operations.
Points and alerts: In alerts you can later choose the proximity radius (distance) around a point of interest. You will receive events up to the defined distance around your point.
Areas
With “Area” you can define a broader area of interest of any shape (polygon) on the map for visualization or monitoring. This can be neighborhoods, city districts, industrial parks or any defined area. Choose when you need to monitor event inside larger zones.
Areas and alerts: If used in alerts areas will trigger alerts for events within the boundaries of the area.
Routes /Lines
Choose routes or lines if you want to visualize, assess or monitor paths or corridors between points, such as supply chains, travel or evacuation routes, or transportation lines.
The “Routes” feature offers a route planner. You can easily create a route between your defined starting point and destination. Just mark these points with a click on the map. You can adapt the proposed route to e.g. alternative, safer roads by dragging the visual to the desired road.
“Lines” are similar to routes but – irrespective of available roads - can represent any linear feature that needs monitoring, such as borders, pipelines, oversea shipping routes, or transmission lines.
Routes/Lines and Alerts: If used in alerts you will receive alerts for events within the defined proximity along your entire route or line.
Topics
Topics are non-geographical interests represented by keywords or specific issues. Instead of being tied to a physical location, topics focus on thematic areas of concern such as cybersecurity threats, political events, or specific types of incidents (e.g., strikes, protests). Topics can be added on “keywords.”
Use Case: Topics allow you to track information relevant to your interests without being limited to a physical space, making them valuable for monitoring trends, threats, or developments that affect your areas of interest indirectly.
How can I find my interests?
Your list of interests is located under SEE. There are two ways of finding your interest and you choose depending on what you want to achieve:
Filter for a view or alert: Use the “Interests” filter when you want to select certain interests for display in a view and/or use in alert.
Navigate to or manage interests: Use this menu for a list view to easily find, navigate to or manage interests (edit, share, import, export, delete), see below for details.
Navigating to Interests: Clicking on an interest tile in the list of interest opens the "Interest Details" of the and automatically navigates the main map to that specific interest. The location is highlighted by a jumping avatar, making it easy to spot.
Interest Management
Update, share or delete a single interest: To edit/update the interest open the “Interest Details” by clicking on an interest from the list. Next, click the pen icon (permission to do so required). Change the desired data and click “Update” on top to save. To share use the share icon and select your recipients.
💡 User Tip: Updates to a larger number of interests are better done via the import file. See our different article or just talk to us.
Manage multiple Interests: Depending on your permissions, you can import (add, update), share, or delete multiple interests from the list view. Each operation applies to only the interest listed (see also "filters" below).
The three dots icon (•••) provides options to share, import/export, or bulk delete the interest based on your selection. Note that these options are subject to your role permissions.
You can manage any interest which you have created (you are the "Author") but may not be able to do so for interest created by others. The ability to edit/delete interests of other uses is restricted to those with explicit "Edit" or "Delete" rights.
Filters:
Filters not only give you an opportunity to easily find what your are looking for but to restrict export/share or delete operations to selected interests.
Viewport filter: By default, only interest within your current viewport (on screen) are listed in the interest menu. You can to switch this filter of by clicking o the screen icon (turning grey) in order to see all your interests globally.
Search: You can find/filter interests by search term.
The funnel icon allows you to filter interests by existing tags.
Share Interests:
Select the interest you want to share. We recommend using “Select All” only with additional defining criteria (e.g. search term, tag or country filter) as will share all current and future interests matching your selection to the recipients.
Click share to open the recipients panel to see and add users with access. Search and pick users by name or user tags (groups). Be careful with sharing to "ALL" users. Have in mind that this will share the selected interest to all current and future users added to your organization.
Click “Share” to share the items and the list of “users with access” will update for your to check.
Provide Context with Interest Details
For each interest you can add important context information. Context information will help to find interest easily or helps users, e.g. your GSOC staff, to understand the interest better when judging the need for action.
Description is a rich text field for most essential information. Content will be visible in the tool tip on mouse over, pictures included.
Tags: Assign tags to your interest to enable the customized filter categories which suit your organization and needs. Use tags to distinguish interests e.g.:
by business area/line
by function (office, manufacturing, R&D or travel, evacuation),
by type (company location, project, customer, supplier),
by supplier/customer name
etc.
💡 User Tip
We recommend ensuring a solid set of global tags to serve as filters for all users. Still, any user can add tags to group/filter interest to their personal needs.
A list of useful data fields, e.g. to add number of employees on site, key contacts, etc. Only data fields used with an interst will be visible to users.
Note: 📝 If you need more/different data fields, let us know.
Attachments: You can save e.g. a location map or a response plan or pictures of landmarks to help navigating an evacuation route.
Styling of interest display: In order to better distinguish your categories of interests you can define the icons and colors of the marker which represent your interest on the map.