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Abstract Summary: BigWig and BigBed files are compressed binary indexed files containing data at several resolutions that allow the high-performance display of next-generation sequencing experiment results in the UCSC Genome Browser. The visualization is implemented using a multi-layered software approach that takes advantage of specific capabilities of web-based protocols and Linux and UNIX operating systems files, R trees and various indexing and compression tricks. As a result, only the data needed to support the current browser view is transmitted rather than the entire file, enabling fast remote access to large distributed data sets. Availability and implementation: Binaries for the BigWig and BigBed creation and parsing utilities may be downloaded at http: //hgdownload. cse. ucsc. edu/admin/exe/linux. x86₆4/. Source code for the creation and visualization software is freely available for non-commercial use at http: //hgdownload. cse. ucsc. edu/admin/jksrc. zip, implemented in C and supported on Linux. The UCSC Genome Browser is available at http: //genome. ucsc. edu Contact: ann@soe. ucsc. edu Supplementary information: Supplementary byte-level details of the BigWig and BigBed file formats are available at Bioinformatics online. For an in-depth description of UCSC data file formats and custom tracks, see http: //genome. ucsc. edu/FAQ/FAQformat. html and http: //genome. ucsc. edu/goldenPath/help/hgTracksHelp. html
Kent et al. (Sat,) studied this question.