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.