Jess goes graphical [JessGUI]

The paper describes JessGUI, a graphical user interface developed on top of the Jess expert system shell. Jess, although powerful as rule engine, lacks graphical environment that would facilitate its usage and made it more accepted between knowledge-based systems' developers. The central idea behind JessGUI project was to make building, revising, updating, and testing Jess-based expert systems easier, more flexible, and more user-friendly. There are many other expert system building tools providing a rich and comfortable integrated development environment to expert system builders. However, they are all either commercial or proprietary products. Jess and JessGUI are open-source freeware, and yet they are well-suited for building even complex expert system applications, both stand-alone and Web-based ones. Another important feature of JessGUI is its capability of saving knowledge bases in XML format (in addition to the original Jess format), thus making them potentially easy to interoperate with other knowledge bases on the Internet.