Geoscience Australia's national mapping program was re-engineered in 2005 to focus more on collaboration with state and territory mapping partners, mapping at large scales in priority areas, aligning with government priorities of the day, and minimising duplication. The National Topographic Information Coordination Initiative (NTICI) was set up to manage this collaboration. Many areas in Australia could not have been recently mapped without this collaboration, and NTICI stakeholders have felt that the benefits in having updated data outweighed new costs in production and data integration.

New priorities such as social inclusion, climate change, indigenous affairs and water management are being aligned through NTICI with the needs of traditional stakeholders such as emergency management. In addition, coordinated sourcing of existing data from third parties is becoming more important due to increasing budget constraints on all government departments. These new priorities and data acquisition initiatives are being integrated through OSDM's National Mapping Requirements/Coordinated Data Acquisition & Licensing Working Group.

Geoscience Australia is now integrating this data along with many of its other key databases into a single high-resolution topographic database. This move is aimed at achieving greater production efficiency and better data currency and accuracy for all of Geoscience Australia's topographic products from 1:100,000 scale through to national scales.

This paper outlines the approach to build the database and make the data available to other areas of government and the public. It will also explore ways to maximise the benefits of collaboration across government and minimise issues associated with the "capture once, use many" approach to mapping.