Analysis of structural changes in OWL 2 ontologies

The urgency of the discussed problem is caused by the need to develop web ontologies in a distributed collaborative manner. One of the tasks is the ontology version comparison and change analysis. The developers require processed information on ontology changes in order to collaborate more efficiently (what entities were changes, added or removed from the ontology), as well as the information on changes performed on each specific entity. This paper proposes a way of analyzing structural changes obtained when using OWL 2 direct semantics, which allows us to reveal entities that were modified, added or removed from the ontology, as well as to find changes related to each modified entity. The author shows the main algorithms, which solve this task, software implementation of the algorithms, and performance testing results.