Capturing cancer initiating events in OncoCL, a cancer cell ontology.

We have developed an ontology, OncoCL, to classify cancer cells and provide a framework for consistent annotation of cancer-associated data from conventional surgical pathology and cancer molecular biology for the purpose of access, comparison, and analysis. The cell type ontology, CL, describes normal cell types and was not designed to capture the pathology of cancer cells. OncoCL builds upon CL, as a canonical cell (represented in CL) undergoes oncogenic change and tumorigenesis with the acquisition of the cancer hallmarks described by Hanahan and Weinberg.