Planned future support for BigBed?

[adkinsrs]

I saw this was a ticket (#573) but was closed as a "not planned". With the eventual 2.0 release removing the HiGlass dependency, is there any renewed interest in supporting the BigBed format? Since BigWig is already supported, I figured it would make sense to support BigBed as well (unless BEDDB is still preferred over BigBed).

[sehilyi]

Thank you for this post. Knowing interest from the community is always helpful for us to prioritize.

We would prefer BigBed over BEDDB since we want to minimize the HiGlass dependency. However, given that we already support BED with tabix, I would say BigBed is a lower priority compared to other features unless there is a specific aspect that BigBed uniquely supports compared to tabixed BED.

I will reopen the ticket to have it on our radar. If you have any use cases in mind that you want us to know, please share them in the ticket.

[adkinsrs]

Thanks for the reply. The main reason for inquiring about BigBed was to ease some conversion pipelining on our side. We are planning to use Gosling for visualizations, but also allow for functionality to view tracks in UCSC Genome Browser via a linkout. Because Gosling only supports BED, and UCSC's trackhub only supports BigBed (as far as I'm aware), a conversion process has to happen when someone uploads a file or URL to our data portal. Currently we plan to have them upload as BigBed, then we convert to BED and add a tabix file to that.