Common ground rules for describing the location of buried services should be agreed by the end of next year, according to a national group. Set up last year to champion better co-ordination between highway authorities, utilities, pipelines companies, and regulators, the National Underground Assets Group has set out its ‘vision for the future’. This will see the development and implementation of standardised procedures for recording and storing location data by the end of 2007. NUAG is working with the Department for Transport to develop these standards. Currently, there are varying degrees of accuracy and referencing approaches between organisations. Codes of practice, scales of diagrams, level of detail, and even symbols used, differ. The first step to ensuring that all can share information will be to create a common achievable national platform. ‘Only then will the progression to real-time intelligent data exchange using web-based technology be possible,’ said NUAG.