History

The original plan and architecture was presented at the 15th International Conference on Interactive Information and Processing Systems (IIPS) for Meteorology, Oceanography, and Hydrology, Dallas, January 1999, American Meteorological Society.

The CAVE Annotation Tool started as a development to explore collaboration and data sharing between National Weather Service (NWS) offices and other agencies. The use of graphics displays for collaboration and data sharing seemed appropriate. This led to the development of tools for annotating weather displays.

The first software release was known as FX-Collaborate (FXC). FXC used AWIPS data and exported AWIPS meteorological displays for annotation. FXC ran on Linux and Windows platforms. Java JDK 1.2 had just been released and promised to be a good language for developing software that could run on multiple platforms.

FXC was used extensively for developing collaboration prototypes for various government agencies. Its powerful annotation capability was also used independently by many NWS forecast offices and the Taiwan Central Weather Bureau.

When AWIPS II was introduced to the offices, a collaboration capability was directly integrated into the baseline software. The annotation capability was developed as a separate plugin that can easily be installed in the AWIPS II CAVE environment.


1998	Start development of FX-Collaborate using Java 1.2.
1999	Presentation at 15th International Conference on Interactive Information and Processing Systems (IIPS) for Meteorology, Oceanography, and Hydrology, at Dallas, TX.
2000	First operational use of FX-Collaborate at Norman, OK.
2002	Development of Prototype Aviation Collaboration Effort (PACE) using FXC-Collaborate.
2003	Operational use of FX-Collaborate at the Southeast River Forecast Center.
2003	Enhancements to FX-Collaborate to Support Operations at NWS, USAF, and NASA.
2004	Use of FX-Collaborate by Central Weather Bureau in Taiwan.
2005	Development of Volcanic Ash Coordination Tool (VACT) using FX-Collaborate.
2006	Wide use of FX-Collaborate at NWS CR and SR for creating Graphicast Web displays.
2008	Development of Geo-targeted Alerting System (GTAS) using FX-Collaborate.
2009	Development of AWIPS II CAVE Annotation Tool starting with basic FX-Collaborate design and code.
2009	Extending the CAVE Annotation Tool to provide an AWIPS II collaboration capabilty (graphic and text).
2017	Web site upgrade and CAT plugin release for AWIPS II 16.4.1/17.1.1/17.2.1/17.3.1.
2018	CAT plugin release for AWIPS II 17.3.1.
2019	CAT plugin release for AWIPS II 18.2.2.
2020	CAT plugin release for AWIPS II 19.3.3.