# Supported Data Types

cBioPortal is a multimodal cancer data visualization tool and supports a variety of data types. For some data types, we have explicit support; for others, you can leverage generic assay or clinical data to assign arbitrary data to either a sample or patient. Beyond including data directly into cBioPortal, one can also link in additional external viewers specialized for particular data types, or even entirely different dashboards or portals. This combination of structured and flexible data formats, as well as the option to link out to other viewers, allows cBioPortal to be used for many different combinations of clinical data and profiling methods.

# Molecular Data

# External Viewer Integration

There are several other data types for which there is no native support. However cBioPortal offers a generic way of linking in additional viewers using the Resource Data Format. Technically this is known as an iframe link. These viewers can be linked at the cohort, patient or individual sample level. Beyond just linking viewers, we also have several suggestions on what kind of derived data can be added from these assays directly into cBioPortal for multimodal analysis. This mainly leverages the Generic Assay Format.

# Clinical Data

The clinical data are free-form de-identified patient and sample attributes. We don't follow a specific ontology, but rely on the authors of the published studies to determine the organization of their clinical data. The only exception is the cancer type categorization which uses the Oncotree ontology. We do allow encoding of the data type for each column (e.g. numerical, text, etc). More details can be found in the Clinical Data File Formats section. We also have a timeline format for incorporating treatment information (see e.g. this AACR GENIE lung cancer case).