Web services for a biomedical imaging portal

TACWeb (TAC images on the Web), is a Web-based Grid portal, developed at the CACT/ISUFI laboratory of the University of Lecce for the management of biomedical images in a distributed environment. TACWeb, building on top of the Globus Toolkit, is an interactive environment that deals with complex user's requests, regarding the acquisition of biomedical data, the "processing" and "delivering" of biomedical images, using the power and security of computational grids. Recently, Grid technologies are being integrated with Web services technologies to provide a framework for interoperable application-to-application interaction. In this paper we present an evolution of the TACWeb architecture that is compliant with the Web services approach and its main functionalities. In such a system, the basic capabilities are encapsulated and exposed as Web services allowing the development of new health applications as a composition of such services.