CAFE: extending CLIPS for the internet

This paper describes CAPE, a programming environment combining CLIPS And Pe rl with Extensions. CLIPS is an efficient and expressive forward-chaining r ule-based system with a flexible object system. Perl is a popular procedura l language with extremely powerful regular expression matching facilities, and a huge library of freely available software. CAPE closely integrates th ese languages, and provides extensions to facilitate building systems with an intimate mixture of the two. The paper describes the facilities CAPE off ers programmers and the demonstration systems and "component applications" distributed with it. The use of the system is then discussed with reference to DIME (Distributed Information Manipulation Environment), a toolkit bein g developed to support identifying and coordinating the use of external kno wledge sources. Finally, planned developments of the system are indicated. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.