The Automated Land Evaluation System, or ALES (pronounced in English as "'ay-less", rhymes with "pay less"), is a computer program that allows land evaluators to build expert systems to evaluate land according to the method presented in the Food and Agriculture Organization's "Framework for Land Evaluation" (1976) and subsequent Guidelines, as explained in the program's background. It is intended for use in project or regional scale land evaluation.
ALES was developed at Cornell University from 1986-1996; in 1997 program author D G Rossiter moved to ITC Enschede in the Netherlands. Although ALES is a DOS program which has not been updated since 1996, it is still a rich expert-system environment and continues in use as part of the land evaluator's toolkit. As long as you want to use it, I will support it.
Colleagues in Bolivia are developing a Spanish-language Windows version of ALES, see their efforts here.
Last modified: Sun Jul 8 13:56:37 CEST 2012