Chapter 7Introduction to CLIPS.ppt

Expert Systems: Principles and Programming, Fourth Edition Chapter 7:Introduction to CLIPS Expert Systems: Principles and Programming, Fourth Edition What is CLIPS? CLIPS is a multiparadigm programming language that provides support for: Rule-based Object-oriented Procedural programming Syntactically, CLIPS resembles: Eclipse CLIPS/R2 JESS Other CLIPS Characteristics CLIPS supports only forward-chaining rules. The OOP capabilities of CLIPS are referred to as CLIPS Object-Oriented Language COOL . The procedural language capabilities of CLIPS are similar to languages such as: C Ada Pascal Lisp CLIPS Characteristics CLIPS is an acronym for C Language Integrated Production System. CLIPS was designed using the C language at the NASA/Johnson Space Center. CLIPS is portable – PC ? CRAY. CLIPS Notation Symbols other than those delimited by , [ ], or should be typed exactly as shown. [ ] mean the contents are optional and mean that a replacement is to be made. * following a description means that the description can be replaced by zero or more occurrences of the specified value. CLIPS Notation Descriptions followed by + mean that one or more values specified by description should be used in place of the syntax description. A vertical bar | indicates a choice among one or more of the items separated by the bars. Fields To build a knowledge base, CLIPS must read input from keyboard / files to execute commands and load programs. During the execution process, CLIPS groups symbols together into tokens – groups of characters that have the same meaning. A field is a special type of token of which there are 8 types. Numeric Fields The floats and integers make up the numeric fields – simply numbers. Integers have only a sign and digits. Floats have a decimal and possibly “e” for scientific notation. Symbol Fields Symbols begin with printable ASCII characters followed by zero or more characters, followed by a delimiter. CLIPS is case sensitive. String Fields Strings must