I am using OWLAPI for a project, and I need to compare two ontologies for differences between them. This would ignore blank nodes so that, for instance, I can determine whether the same OWL restrictions are in both ontologies. Not only do I need to know whether there are differences, but I need to find out what those differences are. does such functionality exist in the OWLAPI, oz is there a relatively simple way to do this?
The equality between anonymous class expressions is not based on the blank node ids - anonymous class expressions only have blank nodes in the textual output, in memory the ids are ignored. So checking if an axiom exists in an ontology will by default match expressions correctly for your diff.
This is not true for individuals - anonymous individuals will not be found to be the same across ontologies, and this is by specs. An anonymous individual in one ontology cannot be found in another, because the anonymous individual ids are scoped to the containing ontology.
Note: the unit tests for OWLAPI have to carry out a very similar task, to verify that an ontology can be parsed, written and parsed again without change (i.e., roundtripped between input syntax and output syntax), so there is code that you can look at to take inspiration. See TestBase.java - equal() method for more details. This includes code to deal with different ids for anonymous individuals.