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. | — |
