Dependability of Location-Based Services: A Largely Overlooked Aspect

There is obvious lack of attention to the dependability issues in literature on location-based services (LBS). Both researchers and practitioners were so far too much concerned with the questions about what useful features an LBS should have, while almost completely leaving out the questions about how to assure such basic properties as reliability or response accuracy. However, LBSs are applications that require high dependability, as we argue in this paper, so assuring those is both more critical and more difficult than usually. We discuss the existence of this disagreement between the actual importance of LBS dependability and the level of attention towards it among practitioners and researchers. We also identify and briefly discuss the major factors influencing dependability of LBSs, namely the quality of content, software reliability, algorithms appropriateness, interface quality, and communication quality.