This paper presents Tempo, a framework for the definition, generation and execution of data processing components. Its architecture is organized on pipelines of modules assembled according to a specific meta-model with respect of contract based communication rules. Each pipeline wraps one or more data processing algorithms provided as reusable blocks in the default package. Such package can be extended with custom solutions through a plug-in mechanism. The Tempo components can be delivered both as web-services and as software library, and can be reused in different contexts by configuration through set of parameters. Although it has been initially tested in the medical field, Tempo is conceived as a general purpose framework. Until now, it has been integrated and tested within a medical guidelines implementation software tool and in a general purpose web application prototype as embedded module for the extraction of temporal patterns from generic time series.