Creative Reality Pty Ltd

planOfile is a trip collaboration system designed early 2005. It provides a way for users to share trip information for past, current and future trips. Not only for sharing trips but it also provides a way for users to collaborate on this information; like a shared whiteboard but for waypoint and trip information. 

Think of a group of people standing around a whiteboard, each with their own pen. Each person can write on the whiteboard and the others can see what has been written. Similarly, planOfile's whiteboard is a 2D (or 3D) map. Each of the users can draw their trip and add waypoints to the map so others can see it. The owner of the map can decide who is allowed to read, write, alter or erase information from it.

Now consider two groups of people where each group has their own whiteboard. It would be possible for the groups to combine their information on one whiteboard, but it probably wouldn't make sense overlapping textual information when considering whiteboards. But if you have two groups of users adding their information to two separate maps, it does make sense to combine this information on to one map. Trip and waypoint information is easily combined from two maps to one map.

planOfile provides a hierarchical way to combine different maps of information on to one map. For example, each member of a club draws their trip on their own map and saves it to the server. The club can then create a map which is the combination of each of the members maps onto one map. This allows interested users to view the combined map of all users trips or they can just view a specific user's map. Any user can create a new map and have it be a combination of existing maps of information.