Real-Time Error in Location Modeling for Ubiquitous Computing

No matter which technologies or techniques a ubiquitous location system uses, its measurements will have some amount of quantifiable error. Unfortunately, error information is often conveyed arbitrarily or simply for performance evaluation instead of as an online characteristic of system behavior. Terms such as accuracy, precision, granularity, and resolution are overloaded with various meanings. In this short paper, we argue that real-time error distributions provide a concise quantitative summarization of system accuracy and are useful in applications, simulation, and sensor fusion.