A tool for Internet-oriented knowledge based systems

Abstract

This paper describes CAPE, a programming environment that combines Clips And Perl with Extensions. CLIPS is an efficient and expressive forward-chaining rule-based system with a flexible object system (supporting both message passing and generic functions). Perl is a popular procedural language with extremely powerful regular expression matching facilities, and a huge library of freely available software modules. CAPE closely integrates these two programming languages, and provides extensions to facilitate building systems with an intimate mixture of the two languages. These features make CAPE an excellent language for building knowledge-based systems to exploit the opportunities being presented by the Internet. This paper describes the current version of CAPE and the facilities it offers programmers, including the demonstration systems and "component applications" that are distributed with it. The use of the system is then discussed with reference to an application for automatically generating graphs of remote web sites. Finally, planned developments of the system are indicated. General TermsRule-based Programming, Knowledge-Based System Tools,