OWLDiff

A tool to perform a 2-way diff of OWL ontologies.

Requirements

Java 14

Run

In order to run OWLDiff run mvn clean install and

for CLI: cd owldiff-cli && mvn assembly:assembly to create an executable JAR file in target/owldiff-cli-<VERSION>-jar-with-dependencies.jar
for Desktop UI: cd owldiff-standalone && mvn assembly:assembly to create a ZIP filetarget/owldiff-standalone-<VERSION>-dist-bin.zip. Unzip it and run bin/owldiff.

Features

syntactic diff/merge functionality
explanations for inferred axioms
various visualization options - Manchester/DL syntax, classified view, plain axiom list
fully semantic diff for EL using the CEX algorithm.
easy Subversion integration

PLAIN (SYNTACTIC) DIFF

is provides an axiom by axiom difference of the ontologies
different axioms are shown in 'green', the common parts are blue (and hidden by default).

ENTAILMENT CHECK

for each axiom that is not contained in the other ontology an entailment check tests whether it can be derived from the other ontology or not.
entailed axioms are shown in 'red'
for inconsistent ontologies the entailment check is disabled

CEX DIFF

if either of the ontologies is not EL, no CEX is performed
axioms with colored background denote those that appear either in DiffR or DiffL list - they represent semantic differences between the classes the semantics of whose has changed (as described in http://www.webont.org/owled/2008dc/papers/owled2008dc_paper_12.pdf)

ENTAILMENT EXPLANATIONS

the incremental algorithm for single explanation generation is used (as described in Křemen, P. - Kouba, Z.: Incremental Approach to Error Explanations in Ontologies. In Proceedings of I-KNOW `07. Graz: Graz University of Technology, 2007, p. 332-339. ISSN 0948-695X )

Known Limitations

imports are currently NOT resolved
just one explanation generated for a single axiom - TODO provide the possibility to get all explanations
usually the only sensible use is to compare ontologies with the same URI - no check is performed to find out whether the ontology/class/property/individual URI changed.

How to run it?

to show the GUI without setting the input files in advance run 'java -jar owldiff.jar' (or the convenience script 'owldiff' on linux)
to perform the diff of file/URI and file/URI run 'java -jar owldiff.jar ' (or the convenience script 'owldiff ' on linux)

Resources

Kremen, P. & Šmíd, M. & Kouba, Z.. (2011). OWLDiff: A practical tool for comparison and merge of owl ontologies. Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Web Semantics. 229-233.
Kremen, P. & Kouba, Z.. (2009). Incremental Approach to Error Explanations in Ontologies. Networked Knowledge - Networked Media - Integrating Knowledge Management 2009: 171-185

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