The CPOF software is based on the CoMotion platform, a proprietary commercial framework for building collaborative information visualization systems and domain-independent "decision communities". CPOF's Tool-and-appliance primitives are designed to let users create quick, throw-away mini-applications to meet their needs in-situ, supporting on-the-fly uses of the software that no developer or designer could have anticipated.
The commander's topsight is based on ground-truth at the moment of the briefing the commander can then communicate intent on live data.ĬPOF users at any level can assemble workspaces out of smaller tool-and-appliance primitives, allowing members of a collaborating group to organize their workflows according to their needs, without affecting or disrupting the views of other users. Annotations and editing-gestures made during briefings become part of the shared repository. During a CPOF briefing, commanders can drill into any data element in a high-level view to see details on demand, and view outliers or other elements of interest in different visual contexts without switching applications. Data inputs from warfighters are conveyed to all collaborators as the "natural" result of a drop-gesture in-situ, requiring no explicit publishing mechanism.ĬPOF is also used as a live-data alternative to PowerPoint briefings. The results of editing gestures are conveyed in real-time to all observers and users of a visualization when one user moves an event on a map, for example, that event-icon moves on all maps and shared views, such that all users see its new location immediately. Drag-and-drop composition on live visualizations is CPOF's primary mechanism for editing data values, such as locations on a map or tasks on a schedule (for example, moving an event-icon on a map changes the lat/lon values of that event in the shared repository moving a task icon on a schedule changes its time-based values in the shared repository). Most data-elements can be grouped and nested via drag-and-drop to form associations that remain with the data in all of its views. Users can drag data-elements and annotation from any visualization framework into any other (i.e., from a chart to a table), which reveal different data-attributes in context depending on the visualization used.
Shared visual elements in CPOF include iconic representations of hard data, such as units, events, and tasks visualization frameworks such as maps or schedule charts on which those icons appear and brush-marks, ink-strokes, highlighting, notes and other annotation.Īll visual elements in CPOF are interactive via drag-and-drop gestures. A shared workspace is the main interface, in which every interface element in CPOF is a shared piece of data in a networked repository. and MAYA Viz (now part of General Dynamics C4 Systems) with the active participation of military personnel as subject matter experts.ĬPOF is one of several examples of collaborative software, but intended specifically for use in a Command and Control capacity. ISX Corporation (now part of Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories) Oculus Info, Inc. The system was developed in a research setting by Global Infotek, Inc.
CPOF began as a DARPA investigation to improve command and control using networked information visualization systems, with the goal of doubling the speed and quality of command decisions.