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These are defined as a way to provide methods of representing and executing decision support, orchestration, analysis and many other aspects of application functionality.  They share in common a way to represent certain behaviors for which a more concise language has been created then traditional programming languages.  Some of them support standards such as OWL DL, or RuleML but may support extensions or additional functionality which make them suitable.

RDF/OWL Tools

Pellet : http://clarkparsia.com/pellet - Pellet is an OWL 2 (partial) reasoner providing the core classification functionality.  Pellet is broadly used and integrated into various platforms including Protege 4 and TopBraid Composer.  It is written directly in Java and so can easily be integrated into other java applications directly without external configurations or implementations.

Fact++ : http://owl.man.ac.uk/factplusplus/ - Fact++ is an implementation of an OWL 2 (partial) reasoner written in C+.  Fact ++ requires the implementation of a component which is accessed by applications.  Because it is written in C+ it has the potential to be faster then Java implementations.  

HermiT : http://hermit-reasoner.com/ - Is an OWL 2 reasoner implementing a high performance algorithm in Java.  It is dependent on the OwlAPI.   

TopBraid SPIN : http://www.topquadrant.com/topbraid/spin/api/ - is an implementation of the SPARQL Inferencing Notation.  It is an open source implementation, and can be integrate in a number of ways.  It has many uses including an RDF Constraint language, a Rules language, a SPARQL Function language (used as a way to extend SPARQL), and a method of storing reusable queries.  Envisioned and implemented by TopBraid, it expands functional behaviors in ways that are impossible to declare in DL, or where it would be inappropriate.  Use of TopBraid SPIN requires the use of the Jena API.

General Purpose

Jess : http://www.jessrules.com/ - Stands for Java Expert System Shell.  Jess is an implementation of the RETE algorithm and supports a number of rule definition languages.  It is the reference implementation of JSR 94 standard for java rule engines. It supports CLIPS and RuleML languages, as well as it's own XML representation of CLIPS.  It provides many ways to extend the functionality into Java Applications in both direction (able to call java functions from the rules, as well as call rule functionality from java).  It is available for without cost for academic  uses as well as various commercial licenses.  It does not have a cost for development, as there is a trial download that times out after a number of days, and can be re-downloaded.

Drools Expert : http://jboss.org/drools/ - Drools is a component of the JBoss community. It is described as a business logic integration platform.  It has a number of components which may be optional integrated to provide different support including a managed rule repository.  It is an implementation of the RETE algorithm. Drools supports a proprietary language as well as an XML representation of it's own language.  Transformations of RuleML to Drools may be available.

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