Building a functional simulation of cells, a tissue, organ or even an entire organism requires an unprecedented effort to fuse techniques derived from biology, chemistry, physics, computer science and information science. Developing models that can be explored using a range of simulation techniques requires a common language capable of describing heterogeneous features and behaviors at various length-scales ranging from molecule to organism. While languages exist for some necessary subareas (e.g. cell physiology, molecular dynamics, and systems biology), many researchers still use ad-hoc formats and vocabulary to describe cell-based multi-cell models (e.g. Cellular Potts Models, Center Models, FEM).

The creation of the Cell Behavior Ontology is an essential first step in providing a universally agreed upon means to describe cell behaviors and consequently (in the longer term) achieve a standardization level similar to the one that the Systems Biology community has achieved with SBML, CellML and the Foundational Model of Anatomy. Just as applications conforming to SBML or CellML can share models encoded in the two standards, so applications conforming to the CBO derived standards (like the proposed Cell Behavior Model Specification Language CBMSL) will achieve similar capacity for model sharing.