Jess For Linux

Jess is a rule engine and scripting environment written entirely in Sun's JavaTM language by Ernest Friedman-Hill at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, CA.

Jess was originally inspired by the CLIPS expert system shell, but has grown into a complete, distinct, dynamic environment of its own. Using Jess, you can build Java software that has the capacity to "reason" using knowledge you supply in the form of declarative rules. Jess is small, light, and one of the fastest rule engines available.

The core Jess language is still compatible with CLIPS, in that many Jess scripts are valid CLIPS scripts and vice-versa. Like CLIPS, Jess uses the Rete algorithm to process rules, a very efficient mechanism for solving the difficult many-to-many matching problem (see for example "Rete: A Fast Algorithm for the Many Pattern/ Many Object Pattern Match Problem", Charles L. Forgy, Artificial Intelligence 19(1982), 17-37.)

Jess adds many features to CLIPS, including backwards chaining, working memory queries, and the ability to manipulate and directly reason about Java objects. Jess is also a powerful Java scripting environment, from which you can create Java objects and call Java methods without compiling any Java code.

Jess can be licensed for commercial use, and is available for academic use.