James Owen (Jim) received his BS in Electrical Engineering from Louisiana Tech in 1973 and his MBA in Quantitative Analysis and Forecasting from LSU in 1989. He has been doing expert systems since 1989 and commercial expert systems since 1997 beginning with Neuron Data Expert and the pre-alpha version of Advisor. Since that time he has focused primarily on rulebased systems in Java including ILOG JRules, Blaze Advisor, PST OPSJ, Sandia Labs Jess and brief excursions into NASA CLIPS.

He started Java in February of 1997 with FedEx VEA project. He writes occasionally for InfoWorld and has been a senior knowledgebased consultant with such companies as FedEx, Houston Light and Power, NorWest Financial (now Wells Fargo), Ericsson Telecom, Lloyds TSB in London, GMAC Insurance and Northrop Grumman.