What is CLIPS?

CLIPS is a productive development and delivery expert system tool which provides a complete environment for the construction of rule and/or object based expert systems. CLIPS is being used by numerous users throughout the public and private community including: all NASA sites and branches of the military, numerous federal bureaus, government contractors, universities, and many companies. The key features of CLIPS are:

• Knowledge Representation: CLIPS provides a cohesive tool for handling a wide variety of knowledge with support for three different programming paradigms: rule-based, object-oriented and procedural. Rule-based programming allows knowledge to be represented as heuristics, or "rules of thumb," which specify a set of actions to be performed for a given situation. Object-oriented programming allows complex systems to be modeled as modular components (which can be easily reused to model other systems or to create new components). The procedural programming capabilities provided by CLIPS are similar to capabilities found in languages such as C, Pascal, Ada, and LISP.
• Portability: CLIPS is written in C for portability and speed and has been installed on many different computers without code changes. Computers on which CLIPS has been tested include an IBM PC running DOS and Windows 95 and a Macintosh running MacOS and Mach. CLIPS can be ported to any system which has an ANSI compliant C compiler. CLIPS comes with all source code which can be modified or tailored to meet a user's specific needs.
• Integration/Extensibility: CLIPS can be embedded within procedural code, called as a subroutine, and integrated with languages such as C, FORTRAN and ADA. CLIPS can be easily extended by a user through the use of several well-defined protocols.
• Interactive Development: The standard version of CLIPS provides an interactive, text oriented development environment, including debugging aids, on-line help, and an integrated editor. Interfaces providing features such as pulldown menus, integrated editors, and multiple windows have been developed for the Macintosh, Windows 95, and X Window environments.
• Verification/Validation: CLIPS includes a number of features to support the verification and validation of expert systems including support for modular design and partitioning of a knowledge base, static and dynamic constraint checking of slot values and function arguments, and semantic analysis of rule patterns to determine if inconsistencies could prevent a rule from firing or generate an error.
• Fully Documented: CLIPS comes with extensive documentation including a Reference Manual and a User's Guide.