The bigWig format is for display of dense, continuous data that will be displayed in the Genome Browser as a graph. The bigWig files are in an indexed binary format. The main advantage of this format is that only those portions of the file needed to display a particular region are transferred to the Genome Browser server. Because of this, bigWig files have considerably faster display performance than regular wiggle files when working with large data sets. The bigWig file remains on your local web-accessible server (http, https or ftp), not on the UCSC server, and only the portion needed for the currently displayed chromosomal position is locally cached as a "sparse file".