The Information Technology and Systems Center (ITSC) at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, as a NASA Earth Science Information Partner (ESIP), is researching the unique problems of applying distributed service technologies to the processing of Earth Science data sets. Conventional distributed service protocols (also known as “web” services) tend to be best suited for exchanging textual data or relatively small amounts of binary data. Processing Earth Science data typically means working with files on the order of megabytes or even gigabytes in size. Web services technologies such as the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) do not provide an efficient solution to handling this much data through conventional means. ITSC researchers have been investigating alternative solutions for providing distributed services that are capable of processing and passing large amounts of data in a service chaining architecture. Service chaining allows one processing solution to comprise multiple distributed functional elements that all work in concert to generate an end product. ITSC will demonstrate integrating simple, autonomous data processing services into chains that efficiently process large Earth Science data sets and can be easily reused in other distributed applications. This presentation will illustrate how the Earth Science Markup Language (ESML) can be used in this environment to describe the output format of a service in the same way it is used to describe the format of a data set. As a result, ESML can be used as an interchange technology to facilitate intelligent chaining of these simple services.