castanyes blaves

Two interesting points from Andy Jenkinson's DAS talk:

(a) Current clients (e.g., Ensembl) can identify that the data from an external server (Lab X) is based on an old coordinate system/assembly (OldCS), project from the old coordinate system to the new one, and prepend "OldCS_" to the names for that track.

(b) When sending BED/WIG/GFF files to current clients (e.g., Ensembl), the files are parsed, a temporary DAS is created in a server, and the data is served to the client as if it were from a DAS server. This is specially attractive for very dense feature sets that need to be visualized in queries of small segments of a chromosome. If the uploading of the file is done in compressed format, the whole operation is very efficient. This is still not the case for URL-based files, which can make your browser painfully slow.