Abstract
There is a significant amount of interest in expert systems and the software tools that are available for developing these systems. Most tools that are developed at university research labs are described in some detail in books, articles, or technical reports. However, there is a need for objective information on commercial software tools for building expert systems. These tools can be used for research, prototyping and developing end‐user applications. Necessarily we must establish a set of criteria which can be used to evaluate these tools. These criteria include an evaluation of the basic features, the development environment, what a tool can be used for, how easy it is to learn and use, how much it costs, and how it is supported. In the first part of this paper, a set of criteria is described for evaluating expert system software tools. In the second part, these criteria are used to evaluate several currently available commercial tools.

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