Expert Systems/Jess

About Jess
Jess, a rule engine for the Java platform, is a superset of CLIPS, developed by Ernest Friedman-Hill of Sandia National Labs. It was first written in late 1995.

It provides rule-based programming suitable for automating an expert system, and is often referred to as an expert system shell. In recent years, intelligent agent systems have also developed, which depend on a similar capability.

Rather than a procedural paradigm, where a single program has a loop that is activated only one time, the declarative paradigm used by Jess continuously applies a collection of rules to a collection of facts by a process called pattern matching. Rules can modify the collection of facts, or they can execute any Java code.

Jess can be used to build Java servlets, EJBs, applets, and full applications that use knowledge in the form of declarative rules to draw conclusions and make inferences. Since many rules may match many inputs, there are few effective general purpose matching algorithms. The Jess rules engine uses the Rete algorithm.

While CLIPS is licensed as open source, Jess is not open source.

Example 1
Code examples:

Example 2
Sample code: