Currently, CCO is being cleaned and improved (many more terms are being added as well as relationships). The ontology in OBO format can be edited using OBO-Edit and the OWL version can also be edited using Protégé. All kinds of curation request and suggestions are very welcome. The project is under constant development, and future plans include other databases, more expressive OWL (adding more Ontology Design Patterns), better querying interfaces, fuzzy relationships, text mining-based enrichment, and more.
The Cell Cycle Ontology (CCO) extends existing ontologies for cell cycle knowledge. CCO integrates and manages knowledge about the cell cycle components and regulatory aspects in OBO, OWL, RDF and other commonly used ontology representations. This knowledge is assembled from a diverse set of already existing resources (GO, UniProt, IntAct, GOA, NCBI taxonomy, and so forth): the combination of the knowledge gives an overall picture of the cell division process. Not only enriched by the combination of resources, Ontology Design Patterns are being applied in the OWL version of CCO to provide a fine-grained and expressive knowledge model of the cell cycle.
The following cartoon depicts a bit of knowledge currently stored in CCO for the specific protein SWI4_YEAST. This local neighborhood also shows the type of relations attached to a protein and the different terms (e.g. localization, interactions, associated process, post-translational modifications, etc). A similar representation can be obtained by exploring CCO with the
BioPortal or with the dynamic interface provided by the DIAMONDS platform.
