Abstract Agent-based approaches have not yet been widely applied to highly complex, data intensive,large-scale information processing systems such as are found in the domain of imagery & geospatial computing. Such systems combine diverse and distributed types of imagery and geospatial data, and require collaboration from multiple experts and processing components. This paper gives a description of the design and implementation of the Agent-based Imagery and Geospatial processing Architecture ( AlGA). Our approach centers on the development of an ontology, light-weight agents, and an agent communication language for imagery & geospatial computing. AlGA agents cooperate with each other to answer specific queries and to efficiently manage distributed resources. Many of the imagery & geospatial exploitation tasks that AlGA agents process are highly complex, with several processing steps involved. We describe in detail how the AlGA system is inherently parallel, thus allowing for parallel implementation. of both new and legacy imagery & geospatial exploitation algorithms. Because this system is agent driven, the parallelism is highly dynamic, reconfigumble via the AlGA communication language, an XML-based specification called I-XML. These I-XML specifications are distributed and transformed by different AlGA agents in the system to achieve a scalable and manageable system design for collaboration and information management. We describe the details of AlGA, the I-XML specification, and our Java based prototype.