  The advancement of single cell RNA-sequencing technologies has led to an
explosion of cell type definitions across multiple organs and organisms. While
standards for data and metadata intake are arising, organization of cell types
has largely been left to individual investigators, resulting in widely varying
nomenclature and limited alignment between taxonomies. To facilitate
cross-dataset comparison, the Allen Institute created the Common Cell type
Nomenclature (CCN) for matching and tracking cell types across studies that is
qualitatively similar to gene transcript management across different genome
builds. The CCN can be readily applied to new or established taxonomies and was
applied herein to diverse cell type datasets derived from multiple quantifiable
modalities. The CCN facilitates assigning accurate yet flexible cell type names
in the mammalian cortex as a step towards community-wide efforts to organize
multi-source, data-driven information related to cell type taxonomies from any
organism.
