The problems of determining open locating-dominating or locating total-dominating sets of minimum cardinality in a graph G are variations of the classical minimum dominating set problem in G and are all known to be hard for general graphs. A typical line of attack is therefore to determine the cardinality of minimum such sets in special graphs. In this work we study the two problems from a polyhedral point of view. We provide the according linear relaxations, discuss their combinatorial structure, and demonstrate how the associated polyhedra can be entirely described or polyhedral arguments can be applied to find minimum such sets for special graphs.