A SOA statistical engine for biomedical data

Currently, large efforts are spent to develop standards and architectures useful to achieve more effective interoperability among medical information systems. Despite such efforts, there are no researches produced so far to directly analyse, with statistical methods, biomedical data represented as eXtensible Markup Language (XML) documents. Thus, the paper proposes an architecture which offers a twofold approach to the statistical analysis of XML data, i.e. via a web service and by extending the query languages used in XML databases. To show how the architecture can be used, a sample system is also reported. Finally, the paper ends by reporting the advantages and drawbacks of the proposed approach in comparison with classic statistical packages. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.