The evaluation engine is a light frame-based knowledge representation system coupled with a trigger-based rule engine. It has been built on top of a professional version of CLOS (Franz Allegro 6.0). This system can be used as a programming language (extending the CLOS functionalities) or can be driven by an external application through a socket connection. In the former case, programming knowledge of CLOS is required as well as a licensed Allegro 6.0 programming environment. In the latter, the system is distributed as a Windows or Solaris Unix executable (Allegro 6.0 programming environment is no required but a licence fee is required by Franz) and no knowledge of CLOS is required to use it.
The result is a software that can be classified as an Artificial/machine intelligence, Expert Systems, Human Computer Interaction and Knowledge engineering/knowledge base systems. The current state of the art in the field is a research prototype of either knowledge representation or rule-based systems. There have been few attempts to combine the two. Our result, compared with the state of the art, is better in terms of efficiency (it provides 2 distinct paradigms in an innovative way) and provides support for non-programmers. It relies on Yes, Allegro 6.0 (runtime licence) and Sun Java.