A processing pipeline is a concept borrowed from the Unix operating system. In a processing pipeline computations are carried out in discrete stages by various tools or services. NetKernel supports the creation of powerful pipelines orchestrated by a scripting language.

This section explores pipelines for image processing using the image resource model, native operating system pipelines (using tools such as awk and grep) as well as a batch processing system that processes a group of documents.

Also included is a look at XML pipeline processing using the XML resource type and services (such as XQuery, XSLT, etc.).