Working procedure. Basically the work that is being done by the MARE NOSTRUM VMS working group consist on each country/area/project representative bringing the information concerning real practice within each country/area/project and sharing it with the rest of the members. Reasons for proposing one VMS or another can be many, but we try to see, each other, what we are really doing in our respective areas, then find common points and differences and try to reach a common similar solution for each specific road situation.

The MARE NOSTRUM VMS GROUP GROUP meets approximately once every two months. A summary of our meetings is available in the minutes elaborated by the Mare Nostrum VMS secretariat. The accumulation of specific road issues, and decisions concerning signing, has lead the group to produce a more structured and detailed written account, the Mare Nostrum VMS Working Book. The Working Book incorporates the whole structure of road issues to be analyzed by the group, and the respective solutions given by each member to date. It also identifies potential drawbacks and critical points (e.g. road events and messages that could require an empirical approach). The working book is organized following that procedure (table 1). The reference point is the international driver: what he/she can understand; which situations are important for him/her in terms of frequency, danger, utility, and the like. Mare Nostrum VMS Group has an specific interest on the development of an International Symbolic Language to be used in the VMS alphanumeric side. Ideally, with the only exception of place names or toponyms, and well known abbreviations (e.g., 'KM', 'MIN'), all words should be banned on the VMS alphanumeric side (e.g. prepositions or conjunctions). Symbolic characters as universal logical or mathematical signs, or culturally arrayed ones (e.g. arrows) should be used instead. As happened previously with the pictogram side, particularly since the 1968 Vienna Convention arrangements, also the alphanumeric side should become supralinguistic. The Mare Nostrum VMS group is currently performing users test to get shareable symbolic formulations for indicating distance, length and distance-length combinations.