  By abstracting Grid middleware specific considerations from clinical research
applications, re-usable services should be developed that will provide generic
functionality aimed specifically at medical applications. In the scope of the
neuGRID project, generic services are being designed and developed which will
be applied to satisfy the requirements of neuroscientists. These services will
bring together sources of data and computing elements into a single view as far
as applications are concerned, making it possible to cope with centralised,
distributed or hybrid data and provide native support for common medical file
formats. Services will include querying, provenance, portal, anonymization and
pipeline services together with a 'glueing' service for connection to Grid
services. Thus lower-level services will hide the peculiarities of any specific
Grid technology from upper layers, provide application independence and will
enable the selection of 'fit-for-purpose' infrastructures. This paper outlines
the design strategy being followed in neuGRID using the glueing and pipeline
services as examples.
