A number of items of data are obtained from a data source and are processed and then stored in a data destination. The data items may each include image data, text data, numeric data or some other type of data, or a combination of these different types of data. The processing of the data is controlled by a project definition which includes several modules selected from a variety of available modules. The modules have input and output ports that are interrelated by binding information. Each project definition is expressed in a public communication protocol, one example of which is the extensible Markup Language (XML) protocol.