Foutposities

Foutposities (singular foutpositie) is a term used in Dutch to describe the locations or moments where errors, faults, or inaccuracies occur within a system, process, dataset, or text. The literal meaning is "error positions." Although the concept is general, it is most often encountered in technical or scientific contexts where identifying the exact point of failure is important for diagnosis and remediation.

In manufacturing and quality control, foutposities denote specific features, steps, or positions in a product or production line in which defects appear, enabling root-cause analysis. In data transmission and storage, foutposities describe the bit positions or time indices where faults are detected. In software debugging, foutposities can refer to lines of code, sections, or execution moments where incorrect behavior arises. In linguistics or text processing, it can indicate positions in a string where spelling or pronunciation errors occur.

Analysts map foutposities to distributions along a timeline, sequence, or spatial axis, using charts or heatmaps to identify error hotspots. Statistical methods such as frequency analysis, clustering, or hypothesis testing may be used to characterize their patterns and persistence over time.

The term is primarily used in Dutch-language technical literature and may not have a standardized English equivalent; in English one would typically say error positions, fault locations, or defect positions depending on the domain. See also fout, positie, fault localization, root cause analysis.