• Journal of Korea Spatial Information System Society
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• v.2 no.2 s.4
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• pp.5-23
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• 2000

Since 1995, national and local governments have competitively initiated many and large GIS projects and audit for the projects becomes an important issue. So far, the audit in the Information Technology(IT) area has tried to deal with the issue but ineffectiveness has been found for the successful GIS project management. Effective auditing is a critical element for the project management. In order to establish a proper audit model for the GIS projects and to promote auditing activities in the projects, this study constructs two hypotheses and tries to prove them. The hypotheses are as follows : 1) For a good audits model for GIS, unique characteristics of a GIS project audit items and the scope of the audit need to be identified. 2) The scope of audit needs to be classified according to the requests from tasks in the projects. To prove the hypotheses, this study analyzes positive aspects of audit in IT and construction projects, clarifies the audit items in GIS projects by comparing with them, and classifies the scope of the GIS audit based on various types of GIS projects. As a results, 5 types of the GIS audit are identified : (1) audit for project management, (2) audit focused on IT, (3) audit characterized by GIS technologies, (4) GIS database audit and (5) consulting services for critical problems in the projects. In addition, 4 criteria in classifying the GIS projects are suggested for the GIS audit. The 4 criteria are domain, scope, duration, and GIS applications technologies. Especially, GIS technology considered in this study includes GIS software, methodologies for GIS development, GIS database and quality control of GIS data, which are not usually reflected in the existing studies about in GIS audit. Because the GIS audit depends on a type of GIS projects, scopes of the audit can be flexibly reconstructed in accordance with the types of GIS projects. This is a key to effective and realistic audit for the future GIS projects. Strategies for effective GIS audit are also proposed in terms of the following: GIS project management, goal establishment in each audit stage, documentation from GIS audit, timing strategies for intensive GIS audit, and designing team structure.