Ontology-based knowledge representation for traditional martial arts

Traditional martial arts are treasures of humanity’s knowledge and critical carriers of sociocultural memories throughout history. However, such treasured practices have encountered various challenges in knowledge transmission and now feature many entries on the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage. In tackling the urgency of knowledge preservation through digital means, this project employs an ontology-based approach to model the conceptual realm of traditional martial arts. Accordingly, it creates the Martial Art Ontology (MAon), a comprehensive domain ontology with an annotated data resource incorporating entities and relations from embodied, epistemic, and sociocultural facets. MAon underlines the significance of embodied qualities and addresses relevant dimensions, such as kinesthetics, techniques, mnemonics, and tactics, along with stylistic, interpretative, and ideological components. It features scholarly terminology developed through literature analysis, interviews with masters, and expert validations. The instantiation of MAon is realized through annotating three archetypal Southern Chinese styles, offering exhaustive descriptions concerning techniques, forms, principles, and form sets, amongst others. In summary, the reported approach encodes the manifold of martial arts into a structured vocabulary and an interlinked data resource, accessible to both human-reading and machine-operating applications. By applying it to manifest a range of knowledge concepts, we demonstrate the potential of ontology-based datafication to create coherent representations for intangible cultural entities and to enable an interoperable data infrastructure across multimodal cultural archives. © The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of EADH.