The Air Force Material Command, Electronic Systems Center (ESC) at Hanscom AFB and the MITRE Corporation developed CoT using Extensible Markup Language (XML). CoT focus's on the What, Where, and When information being passed from one system to another through the common machine language of XML. XML is a simple and flexible format that was derived from SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) which is a common machine language to convert and transfer data from one machine to the next.
Cursor on Target got its name from General Jumpers speech given at the C2ISR conference. His vision, “the sum of the wisdom is a cursor over the target”, focus’s on the ability to pass, correlate, and select information with the push of a button , ie the cursor. The term often used is "Cursor on Target, Click to approve", which implies the information is being passed nearly simultaneously as all the parties involved in the targeting cycle are seeing the information and verifying its accuracy prior to targeting.
