A GUI for Jess

Abstract

The paper describes JessGUI, a graphical user interface developed on top of the Jess expert system shell. The central idea of the 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. An 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. Jess and JessGUI are also used as practical knowledge engineering tools to support both introductory and advanced university courses on expert systems. The paper presents design details of JessGUI, explains its links with the underlying Jess knowledge representation and reasoning tools, and shows examples of using JessGUI in expert system development. It also discusses some of the current efforts in extending Jess/JessGUI in order to provide intelligent features originally not supported in Jess.