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 minimise duplication. The National Topographic Information Coordination Initiative 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 and water management are being aligned with the needs of traditional stakeholders such as emergency management.

Geoscience Australia is now integrating this data along with many of its other key databases into a single high resolution topographic database. This move from multiple scale-specific databases to a single database for the generation of all products, including 100K, 250K and 1M maps and Geodata, is aimed at achieving greater production efficiency and better data currency and accuracy. However there are risks that cartographic quality will suffer and topological relationships will be lost.

This paper outlines the approach taken to build the database, maximise benefits and alleviate potential risks. It will also explore ways to maximise the benefits of collaboration and minimise the issues associated with the "capturing once, using many" approach to mapping.