The Society of Land Referencers (SoLR) is the professional body for land referencing practice. Its purpose is to bring together people who deliver and benefit from land referencing, to form a community, facilitate the growth of the industry and support careers. SoLR regards the development and promotion of technical standards as a core part of its role in supporting excellence in the delivery of land referencing services to the infrastructure and development sectors.

This document is the first proposed publication in the SoLR Land Referencing Standard series. It has been prepared by the SoLR Standards and Ethics Committee in response to the absence of a published technical standard specific to land referencing practice.

Land referencing is a specialised professional discipline with a significant role in the delivery, operation and management of infrastructure and development. The absence of a common standard has made it difficult for clients to specify requirements, for practitioners to demonstrate the quality of their work and for the profession to use a shared technical language. This document is intended to address those needs.

The standard is structured as a family:

conceptual standards specify common information, relationships, process outcomes and outputs independently of a jurisdiction or statutory procedure;

jurisdictional standards translate the conceptual requirements for a particular legal territory; and

procedural standards specify additional requirements arising from a particular statutory, administrative or contractual process.

This document is a conceptual standard. It does not state the law, define a land referencing methodology or prescribe software. Jurisdictional and procedural requirements take precedence where they impose additional or different obligations.

This document has been drafted with regard to the principles and rules for the structure and drafting of standards in the ISO/IEC Directives, Part 2. It is a SoLR publication and has not been submitted to, adopted by or approved by ISO, IEC, BSI, NSAI or another national or international standards body.

In this document:

“shall” indicates a requirement;

“should” indicates a recommendation;

“may” indicates a permission; and

“can” indicates a possibility or capability.

Notes and examples are informative and do not contain requirements.

SoLR invites technical comments on this Committee Draft. Comments should identify the clause, proposed change and supporting rationale and should be sent to hello@SoLR.org.uk.

This work is intended to be published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence, subject to confirmation before publication.