Geography Hierarchy is a data model that lets you establish conceptual parent-child relationships between geographies. A geography, such as Tokyo or Peru, describes a boundary on the surface of the earth. Applications can extrapolate information based on this network of hierarchical geographical relationships.
For example, in Geography Hierarchy, the state of California is defined as the parent of San Mateo county, which is the parent of Redwood City, which is the parent of the postal code 94065. If you enter just 94065, the application can determine that the postal code is in California, or that the corresponding city is Redwood City.
Oracle Trading Community Architecture (TCA) and other Oracle E-Business Suite applications can leverage Geography Hierarchy for various uses related to locations, such as real-time address validation and tax calculation. The geography information is centrally located in TCA and shared among all the applications.
Note: TCA does not provide seeded geography information, but the data model and features to set up and store that information.
The top level of Geography Hierarchy is Country, so the hierarchy essentially contains countries and their child geographies. Other aspects of Geography Hierarchy include:
Geography Type: A divisional grouping of geographies, either geopolitical (for example, City, Province, and District) or physical (for example, Island, Mountain, and Continent).
Geography: A physical space with boundaries that is a defined instance of a geography type. For example, San Jose is a geography of the City geography type.
Country Structure: A hierarchical grouping of geography types for a country. For example, the structure for United States is: State, County, City, then Postal Code.
Geography Usage: A classification of a set of geography types to indicate the purpose and usage of that data, for example for taxation. For example, the State, County, and City geography types can be used for calculating US sales tax.
Master Reference Geography Hierarchy: The Geography Hierarchy data considered as the single source of truth. It is all the data, including geography types and geographies, that you define and maintain in TCA Geography Hierarchy administration.
The geography usage for the entire hierarchy is Master Reference, and defined geography types and geographies are considered master reference geography types and geographies. For example, Country is a universally recognized geography type, and United States is considered a master geography.
Master Reference Geography Hierarchy data is used as the source for validating addresses, and for creating user-defined geography hierarchies, which include boundaries, or zones, for business-specific uses. So while the Master Reference Geography Hierarchy is the source of truth for geography data, for example with all the US states defined, user-defined geography hierarchies contain entities with arbitrary boundaries, namely, tax zones that encompass various US states in each zone.
User-Defined Geography Hierarchy: A classification of geographical data, created from master reference data or manually entered, for tax purposes. A user-defined geography hierarchy can have:
Zones: User-defined geographical boundaries for the specific geography usage, based on Master Reference Geography Hierarchy data. For example, a Tax geography usage can have the San Jose Tax zone, and a Sales geography usage the Southwest Sales Region zone. The boundaries of the Southwest Sales Region zone would enclose various master reference states, for example California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and New Mexico.
Zone Type: A layer or grouping of zones, for example, Income Tax and Sales Regions zone types. The Sales Regions zone type would contain zones such as Southwest Sales Region, Midwest Sales Region, and so on.
Geography Name Referencing is the process of validating and mapping address elements of existing location table records against master reference geographies. For example, for a specific address record, the CA value in the STATE column of the HZ_LOCATIONS table is mapped to the master reference geography of CA.