Canberra and Queanbeyan, most of South Australia and Sydney have already been made available on the Geoscape platform, a continent-wide geospatial tool that provides a three-dimensional representation of urban buildings and two-dimensional profiles of rural properties.

Tree heights and additional building features such as swimming pools and solar panels are also included in the tool.

Australia's public sector mapping agency PSMA developed Geoscape with the help of DigitalGlobe, a Colorado-based provider of satellite imagery.

While smaller geospatial packages for Australian centres were available, this would be the largest single dataset available when completed.

PSMA chief executive Dan Paull said the data would be useful for governments, builders and insurance companies to attain a clearer picture of Australia's built environment.

"A good example is looking at how to ensure that mobile phone networks are optimised, and that's all about understanding clutter in the environment, understanding how buildings and vegetation affect signal propagation," he said.

"Knowing where those things are is going to become more important with the next generation of mobile networks, 5G, to understand how the signals will interact with the built environment."

The maps would also be used immediately after natural disasters to determine the impact of the catastrophe on infrastructure and vegetation.

The full national rollout was expected to be completed by the middle of next year, a timeframe Mr Paull said was "very short for what is effectively a large portion of the Earth's surface".

The data was produced through the collection of multiple satellite images over the continent, which then added height levels for buildings, water and vegetation through cloud computing and machine learning artificial intelligence.

DigitalGlobe founder and chief technology officer Walter Scott said the main challenges in collecting the data came from weather and "urban canyons" blocking smaller buildings.

"It doesn't do any good if you say 'we did a data set but we couldn't get your building because there was a cloud over it'," he said.

The project had begun work on areas including rural NSW, Victoria, Tasmania, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and urban Cairns.

Urban areas outside the already-complete Canberra, Queanbeyan, Sydney and Adelaide are pending.

Mr Paull said the team had worked to ensure there was no personal information within the dataset in an effort to alleviate privacy concerns.

He said the data would be updated at least annually to include new buildings, tree clearing and other new information.

"Every time we happen to have our satellites passing over Australia, which is several times a day, we are collecting and that data is going into a production pipeline," Mr Scott said.