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Review
. 2018 Nov 16;18(11):3999.
doi: 10.3390/s18113999.

Location Information Quality: A Review

Champika Ranasinghe  1 , Christian Kray  2
Affiliations
Review

Location Information Quality: A Review

Champika Ranasinghe et al. Sensors (Basel). .

Abstract

The quality of location information is an important factor for location-based services (LBSs). In the literature, the quality of location information has been defined in different ways based on varying sets of aspects. The objectives of this paper are to review existing literature discussing location information quality and to provide a consistent framework for describing and dealing with location information quality. In particular, we review existing literature on different aspects of location information quality and on factors that affect location sensing technologies (and thus location information quality). Based on this review, we also propose a simple model for describing location information quality and a classification of the strategies for dealing with variations in the quality of location information. Designers of location sensing systems can use this model as a standard vocabulary for describing the quality of location information. The classification of strategies can be used by developers of LBSs apps to design alternative strategies for dealing with location information quality on three levels: sensor-level, algorithm-level, and application-level, which are aligned with the Location Stack model.

Keywords: adaptation strategies; location-based services; positional information; quality of location information.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest. The founding sponsors had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, and in the decision to publish the results.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
The Location Stack: A layered software engineering model for ubicomp apps developed by Hightower et al. [3].
Figure 2
Figure 2
Aspects representing quality of location and orientation information along the spatial and temporal dimensions.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Factors that affect the quality of location information.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Signal propagation: reflection, refraction and diffraction.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Three classes of adaptation strategies to mitigate variations in the quality of location information aligned with the layers of the Location Stack model from [3].
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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