Rule-based Programming for Building Expert Systems: a Comparison in the Microbiological Data Validation and Surveillance Domain

In this work, we compare three rule-based programming tools used for building an expert system for microbiological laboratory data validation and bacteria infections monitoring. The first prototype of the system was implemented in KAPPA-PC. We report on the implementation and performance by comparing KAPPA-PC with two other more recent tools, namely JESS and ILOG JRULES. In order to test each tool we realized three simple test applications capable to perform some tasks that are peculiar of our expert system.