OWLDiff: A Practical Tool for Comparison and Merge of OWL Ontologies

As the semantic web is becoming more mature, the need for complex, large, formally described ontologies grows. Developing such ontologies is rather nontrivial and complex task requiring collaboration among knowledge engineers and domain experts. To support ontology sharing we introduce OWLDiff, an OWL 2 ontology comparison/merge tool, its algorithms, implementation details and usage examples. OWLDiff can be used for syntactic, explanation-based and semantic comparison and merging of OWL 2 ontologies and integrates also a Subversion client for ontology versioning. The system is open-source and is available as a standalone application, Protégé plugin and NeOn toolkit plugin.