Expert systems in Python

Many years ago now my PhD was all about building an expert system to deduce chemical mechanisms for reactions in the troposphere. The system, uninspiringly called MechGen, worked up to a point but was always pretty hairy underneath. Ever since that time I have always kept my
eye open for software components that might work a bit better.

One part of the jigsaw might be openbabel, a cheminformatics toolkit with a Python wrapper, but I have always drawn a blank in finding expert system tools that integrate with Python — until now.

PyCLIPS is an interface between python and the venerable CLIPS expert system shell. For a relatively young opensource project it looks very impressive. The documentation is very detailed and it’s distributed as an Egg therefore I was able to test it out very quickly.

I can see an oportunity to rekindle my interest in expert systems. Maybe one day there will even be a Mechen2?