Ecco: A Hybrid Diff Tool for OWL 2 ontologies

The detection and presentation of changes between OWL ontologies (in the form of a diff ) is an important service for ontology engineering, being an active research topic. In this paper, we present a diff tool that incorporates structural and semantic techniques in order to, firstly, distinguish effectual and ineffectual changes between ontologies and, secondly, align and categorise those changes according to their impact. Such a categorisation of changes is shown to facilitate the navigation through, and analysis of change sets. The tool is made available as a web-based application, as well as a standalone command-line tool. Both of these output an XML change set file and a transformation into HTML, which allows users to browse through and focus on those changes of utmost interest using a web-browser.