ErgoAI vs. Flora-2 (open source)

ErgoAI is a full-featured, commercially supported, enterprise-ready platform tool for AI reasoning and semantic rules, with a uniquely comprehensive set of capabilities. Developed by Coherent’s team of industry leaders in semantic rule-based reasoning, it is based on major research advances in logic.  ErgoAI consists of two major components:  ErgoAI Reasoner and ErgoAI Studio.  Reasoner is a reasoning engine.  Studio is an Integrated Development Environment for knowledge authoring, querying, testing, and debugging.

ErgoAI Reasoner was inspired by Flora-2, an open-source, community supported tool that was previously developed as a purely academic project by several members of the Coherent team.  Coherent Knowledge supports the Flora-2 effort and contributes greatly to its ongoing maintenance and other development.

Flora-2 is a subset of the core ErgoAI engine, ErgoAI Reasoner.

The table below gives a detailed comparison of the capabilities of ErgoAI to those of Flora-2.

ErgoAI Flora-2
Support, Maintenance & Professional Services
Development Intensity Active development: frequent releases, with enhancements and significant new features. Infrequent releases, with minor improvements.
Technical Support Coherent provides full technical support, maintenance, and prioritized bug fixes to licensed ErgoAI customers. Supported by a small community of volunteers. Occasional bug fixes.
Professional Services Coherent offers additional support and custom enhancements, on a consulting basis.
Enterprise Integration and Deployment
Integrated
Development Environment (IDE)
ErgoAI Studio, included in ErgoAI, is a powerful IDE for developing applications with ErgoAI.
Enterprise Deployment Support for virtualization, such as Docker. Coherent’s experienced deployment team integrates ErgoAI into current or legacy environments.
Java Interface Enterprise grade Ergo-to-Java and Java-to-Ergo interface. Basic Java-to-Ergo interface only.
Python Interface Allows Python programs to query and update ErgoAI knowledge bases. Works with Python 2.7.x and 3.x.
OWL/RDF Import ErgoAI supports importing and reasoning with OWL and RDF knowledge.
SPARQL Interface SPARQL endpoint querying interface included in ErgoAI.
JSON Import/Export JSON import and export included in ErgoAI.
Web Services HTTP and Web Services package simplifies the job of accessing the Web and talking to Web services.
Performance
(speed and scalability)
Orders of magnitude faster for loading large data sets. Improved inferencing performance for dynamically changing complex knowledge bases.  Faster compilation of complex knowledge. Limited scalability, especially for large data sets.
Execution Monitoring and Analysis Extensive tools for:  real-time pausing, resuming, monitoring computation; diagnosing problems in performance and runaway recursion.
Explanations, Natural Language Support & More
Explanations
(justification of inferences)
Detailed explanations for each query answer.  Explanations in English.  Source provenance. Comprehensive support for generating, presenting, and user-navigating explanations. Simplified JSON interface.
ErgoText Knowledge entry and querying via natural language sentence templates.
Expressiveness for Complex Natural Language ErgoAI reasoner supports rules with heads that can contain general higher-order formulas, including logical quantifiers. This is important in many situations, especially in acquiring knowledge from English.
Probabilistic Reasoning Support for advanced probabilistic reasoning that integrates uncertain knowledge from multiple sources, including from machine learning.
Integrity Constraints, Triggers, Alerts Automatic maintenance of integrity constraints, the ability to define triggers and alerts that fire up when certain user-defined conditions are met.
Other enhancements In-line evaluable expressions:  useful for arithmetic, lists, and more.  Additional built-ins.  More extensive support for XML data types.