An agent-based architecture for distributed imagery and geospatial computing

This paper gives a description of the design and implementation of the agent-based imagery and geospatial processing architecture (AIGA). Our approach centers on the development of an ontology, light-weight agents, and an agent communication language for imagery and geospatial computing. AIGA agents cooperate with each other to answer specific queries and to efficiently manage distributed resources. Many of the imagery and geospatial exploitation tasks that AIGA agents process are highly complex, with several processing steps involved. We describe in detail how the AIGA system is inherently parallel, thus allowing for parallel implementations of both new and legacy imagery and geospatial exploitation algorithms. As this system is agent driven, the parallelism is highly dynamic, reconfigurable via the AIGA communication language, an XML-based specification called I-XML. We describe the details the AIGA, I-XML specifications, and our Java based prototype.