Work on CAMEO began in 2000 at the University of Kansas with financial support from the National Science Foundation.
The first paper on the subject, by Deborah J. Gerner was written for the March 2002 Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association in New Orleans.
The coding software used for CAMEO, as well as for the automated WEIS implementation that CAMEO was compared with, was the Textual Analysis by Augmeted Replacement Instructions (TABARI) software developed by co-author Philip A. Schrodt in 2000, and was in turn based on the Kansas Event Data System (KEDS) developed in 1994.
[3] The CAMEO manual describes the following key stages of the history of work on the project:[4] One of the alternatives to CAMEO is Integrated Data for Events Analysis (IDEA), an outgrowth of work by the PANDA project.
[5] Predecessors to CAMEO include the World Interaction/Event Survey (WEIS) coding system by Charles A. McClelland and the Conflict and Peace Data Bank (COPDAB) by Edward Azar.