The system, initially to seven agencies, will supply satellite, maps and topographic imagery. Currently most of the work has been directed towards ensuring compatible architecture for file transfer between the state's 15 agencies.

The project, known as the Shared Land Information Platform (SLIP) was promoted by the Department of Land Information as an effective way to share critical information between Western Australian government agencies.

Martin Brewer, chief technical officer of SLIP, said the data will be used for various emergency incident response plans. The goal for SLIP was to produce framework and architecture to allow digital images to be sent. It is up to the individual agencies to develop their own applications to access the framework.

"At the end of June we completed pilot stage three, rolling the architecture out to two further agencies, the Department of Conservation and Land Management and Fire and Emergency Services and by the end of June we will have 74 different data sets from aerial imagery to street directories and topology from Western Australia," Brewer said.

"The service goes live Monday (July 24) for the user community who will self-register for the system through eTrust IdentityMinder (provided by Computer Associates).