In this paper we look at the application of XML data management support in scientific data analysis workflows. We describe a software infrastructure that aims to address issues associated with metadata management, data storage and management, and execution of data analysis workflows on distributed storage and compute platforms. This system couples a distributed, filter-stream based dataflow engine with a distributed XML-based data and metadata management system. We present experimental results from a biomedical image analysis use case that involves processing of digitized microscopy images for feature segmentation.