Open source expert system [closed]

Question

does anyone know about a open source expert system? actually, I'm rather interested in calling its inferential engine from C#.

Answer 1

Both CLIPS and JESS are already mentioned in other answers, so I will supply this link to CLIPS versus JESS: http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/~kristof/research/notes/clipsvsjess/

It was written June 4, 1999, and at that time the advantage was clearly with CLIPS.

If you don't want to read it all, here are the conclusions:

Chapter 3 The conclusions

Both CLIPS and JESS are products with a large support on the internet, but CLIPS seems to have a broader audience, probably because it exists longer. This difference in age results in the CLIPS package being more stable and complete, while JESS users will still experience some minor bugs. JESS is constantly updated and the author, Ernest Friedman-Hill, has been very responsive to user/developer feedback and regularly puts out new releases and bug fixes.

Nowadays, the choice between JESS and CLIPS depends on the application. If it is web-based or should reside in applet-form, the choice of JESS is a very logical one (which is even supported by the authors of CLIPS). For the more classic applications, CLIPS will probably be chosen because of its reputation of being more stable and having more support.

The future of JESS depends highly on the evolution of the web, the Java programming language and its own future stability. These three conditions make that there is a great possibility that JESS will become more popular and more frequently used. Especially the object-oriented possibilities and the easy integration into Java code makes JESS’ future very promising.

CLIPS, on the other hand, is more likely to implement the new and sophisticated features first as they come out, since it still has the advantage in time. CLIPS has also various extensions and variants(like FuzzyCLIPS, AGENT CLIPS, DYNACLIPS, KnowExec, CAPE, PerlCLIPS, wxCLIPS and EHSIS to name a few) that give it an advantage with respect to support of methods like fuzzy logic and agents.

The multifunctional developing environment of CLIPS for operating systems that support windows is also an advantage, while JESS has just one window with two buttons (‘clear window’ and ‘quit’), without a menu. Figures 1 and 2 depict both environments.

To summarize, CLIPS is still more complete and stable than JESS, but this might change in the future, since the JESS package is being improved constantly. Besides that, JESS has also the property of using Java, which in the long run might prove to be a big advantage over CLIPS.

These links may also be of interest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLIPS

Commercial & Freeware Expert System Shells http://www.kbsc.com/rulebase.html

Are there open source expert systems with reasoning capabilities?

Answer 2

I went through the same process, about a year ago, trying to find a good .Net system for this. I recall finding a few decent engines, but they were all too general, and required too many assumptions.

In the end I found that writing my own system was pretty easy to do, and it did exactly what I wanted it to, without any extra bull to make it work with some abstract generalized engine.

It might help to know what your intended use is.