Digital pathology data brokerage: a standard recommendation for complex digital pathology information web-services.

A novel recommendation for the Digital Pathology Information Web-Services (DPIWS) standard is presented, with respect to specific characteristics of the informative content of discourse. The recommendation establishes a common software interface for the exchange of digital pathology (DP) images and related metadata over the web, independently of storage, encoding, and internal handling details. The proposed structure is implemented and tested in a "Pathomation" software environment.