Recently, Web Ontology Language (OWL) has become a widely-used language for providing a source of precisely defined concepts. The number of OWL documents, increasing with the growth of the Semantic Web, leads to the heterogeneous problem. The same concepts may be defined differently, using different terms and positions in the documental structure. Therefore, identifying the element similarity in different ontologies becomes crucial for the success of web mining and information integration systems. In this paper, we propose a new semantic similarity measure for comparing elements in different OWL ontologies. This measure is designed to enable the extraction of information encoded in OWL element descriptions and to take into account the element relationships with its ancestors, brothers, and children. We evaluate the proposed metrics in the context of matching two OWL documents to determine the number of matches between them. The experimental results show better accuracy over other approaches.