PISCES (Property Information Systems Common Exchange Standard)  Residential Conveyancing Workgroup

The PISCES Standard is a set of definitions and rules to facilitate automatic data transfer between software packages used regularly by the real estate market. It is not itself a piece of software but allows software providers to prepare solutions within their own packages for transfer of data to and from their databases.

Development to date has focused on the transfer of management and valuation data in the UK property market, but the PISCES mission is:

'To enable the efficient, effective and rapid exchange of all real estate data throughout the world by developing a standard protocol to describe that data and its exchange, together with supporting infrastructure and administration to support and encourage adoption.'

The PISCES Standard has been developed using Extensible Markup Language (XML), a set of rules for designing text formats to structure data. XML has been developed and is supported by the world's leading technology companies who formed the World Wide Web consortium (W3C) to control the development of the internet. XML has been defined by this group to meet the explosion of international demand for transfer of data between systems and via the internet.

DPS have been associate members of Pisces for 2 years and have been developing software to follow the standard.

The Residential Conveyancing Workgroup has been set up to refine the elements of the standard dealing with the exchange of information between conveyancers.

DPS feel that the PISCES standard is one that will affect all property transactions in the future, making them both smoother and cost efficient for those using it. It is vital that those firms undertaking volume conveyancing work will need software that follows the standard.

One of the huge benefits of the standard is that providing software follows it then, land registry can talk to the conveyancer, can talk to the estate agent, and can talk to lenders producing a virtually transparent communications network of disparate computer and software systems.

PISCES is the glue that brings all the parties that are involved in property transactions together.

DPS supports the standard (which is currently at revision 1.6.1) and intend to submit their software for testing against the standard in the last quarter of 2005.

If you require further information on the PISCES standard click on the following link http://www.dpssoftware.co.uk/pisces_pr.asp or contact DPS Software on 020 8804 1022 or email info@dpssoftware.co.uk .