Intangible cultural heritage (ICH) is the discipline that encompasses methods to encode for preservation, publish and transmit objects of cultural signi cance that have no correspondence in material culture like artworks and buildings do. The boundaries of what should be captured as intangible cultural objects are blurred, due to their immaterial nature. However, concepts such as style, experience, tradition and, as a generalisation of the latter, cultural contact, have all been subjects of study in ICH research. Even though a great deal of the body of ICH is intrinsically endangered by being conveyed through oral history, occasionally available material evidence may serve as a vehicle through which intangible elements are captured [2]. Every so often, focused e orts respond to this challenge through several means, notably by capturing performances of culturally signi cant activities in multimedia or multimodal capacities [9]. One of the channels where intangible culture is expressed is kinesthesia: whereas purely kinetic dimensions such as pose, gesture and movement, are themselves information carriers, it is through their perception that they acquire signi cance in studying their role in the transmission of culture. This has been primarily carried out in the context of dance, arguably the best-known performative discipline that values motion, perception and interpretation, however, this also holds true in martial arts. As in dance, many forms and styles are expressed through allegorical devices, such as the crane or the drunkard, which either reveal the source of inspiration for a given technique, or provide a means to facilitate its transmission. Another example is the osmosis between military and civilian martial arts - the latter employing makeshift weapons or simulating ? This work was supported by CROSSINGS - Computational Interoperability For Intangible and Tangible Cultural Heritage, a project in Collaborative Research on Science and Society (CROSS 2021).
them with hand techniques due to the prohibition to bear arms - to counter the phenomenon of piracy in China. Such in uence materialises into cultural traits.
This paper introduces an ongoing study aimed at understanding how such a complex, immaterial and kinesthetic art form as martial arts can be formally modelled so that its cultural traits can be singled out, with a view of detecting phenomena of contact such as in uence, assimilation or domination. The study will contribute: (1) a exible, standards-compliant formal ontology that models martial arts through kinesthetic, stylistic and social lenses; (2) an instantiation of the ontology in the context of the Hong Kong Martial Arts Living Archive; (3) a method for detecting ICH traits through an existing cultural contact ontology. 2 2.1
The movement in martial arts as ICH
Unlike tangible monuments, where cultural identities are manifested through
physical objects, intangible heritage is de ned through its reliance on tacit and
embodied practices. These are, in turn, subject to a dynamic process of human
interactions, as well as a constant transformation linked to social change and
exchange. Taking up Wulf's statement, the intangible culture practices are usually
bodily, performative, expressive, symbolic, rule-based, and non-instrumental.
Therefore, to transmit them, we need a social and interactive process where
the human body functions as the medium to acquire practical knowledge [
The oeuvres of ICH comprise the practices from diverse nations and cultures.
Among those, martial arts - being an experience that \resonates with everything
it touches, changing how you think and act, perceive and feel" [
HKMALA: The Hong Kong Martial Arts Living Archive
Through the sustained creation and re-creation of diverse ethnic groups, Chinese
martial arts nowadays are practised in countless groups at various organisational
levels, ranging from \families" to \schools" and \sects", each with its own set of
philosophies, concepts, techniques, and training systems [
In response, the Hong Kong Martial Arts Living Archive (HKMALA)
originated as a heritage project in 2012, to archive Hong Kong's rich and diverse kung
fu styles with traditions [
The current logical organisation of resources in HKMALA re ects the use
case of assembling them for exhibitions around a designated theme.4 To organise
them into an open-access learning resource requires a knowledge organisation
system that has both the exibility to accommodate content in the diverse South
Chinese martial arts spectrum, and awareness that said content is a carrier
of ICH elements like tradition, style and in uence. Providing such ontological
grounding, as described in what follows, is part of our mission. Once this is
carried out and HKMALA is published accordingly, it will play an active role in
the preservation, re-activation and revitalisation of traditional martial arts [
Our rst e ort in the knowledge organisation of HKMALA is to construct a formal ontology. This has the dual aim of: (1) using it for modelling HKMALA metadata into a knowledge graph, and the latter for reorganising multimedia/modal content and enabling ontology-based access to it; (2) enabling cultural studies by identifying the potential for entities in the ontology to constitute cultural traits, so that a rule system for detecting contact can be built upon them.
Any modelling e ort with a focus on cultural heritage must provide a scholar with the tools to single out and highlight the entities with a potential to contribute as traits of a culture, or to be transmitted through a form of contact. Martial arts are no exception, less so because their manifestations are only seldom captured as cultural objects, and any encoding e ort comes at a loss. Whilst in our use case kinetic and kinesthetic elements hold our primary interest, it cannot be denied that dimensions pertaining to, e.g. how the discipline is taught or the symbology of preset choreographies, are equally culturally signi cant.
Based on these design considerations, the ontology network is being developed to satisfy these requirements: 4 Some themed exhibitions were: Lingnan Hung Kuen Across the Century: Kung Fu Narratives in Cinema and Community (2017), and Safeguarding the Community: an Intangible Cultural Heritage New Media Exhibition (2018). 1. Modular. As the dimensions along which cultural contact is traced vary profoundly, each is best captured in its own ontology module. 2. General. Use cases aside, the model should be general enough to be adapted to most martial arts or to non-combative kinesthetic performing arts. 3. Inferenceable. Cultural traits are not made explicit: as many entities have a potential to act as manifestations of a culture, they only materialise as such when an inference is made, or in data built upon the ontology. 4. Grounded. Build the model up to the level where the entities specialise those of a designated upper ontology, and use the latter as a reference.
Developments of our martial arts ontology system are being made openly available on GitHub.5 We have structured our network along three possible dimensions through which lenses can be built to highlight a cultural phenomenon (req. #1). These are the kinesthetic, stylistic, and social dimensions.
The starting documentation for this modelling e ort is the corpus of panel texts and media captions for the exhibitions that were established for HKMALA through the years, as well as multimedia subtitles of interviews to masters and their technique explanations. The base terminology was lifted from the corpus by project members and engineered as classes and properties. The resulting key concepts are synthetically shown in Figure 1, with nodes for classes and edges for properties relating them through either domain and range, or class restrictions. The gure re ects the organisation into modules denoting the principal cultural dimensions, with classes serving as contact points between them. Kinesthetic dimension. The features that describe the articulation of the human body or weaponry during a stance or attack belong in this module. These 5 CROSSINGS ontologies, https://github.com/CROSSINGS/ontologies.
Grip on handlled
with Handling kinesthesia
Armament employs represented by Bodily Hardness
Posture
Technique requires with stanceabsorbs
Vital Flow
taught at Syllabus
MA
Community valid for adopts Grading
belongs in Scale Symbolic Object represented by
Styling
System has intent Intentive
Approach
part of practiced in part of uses
Training Choreo- practiced in Method graphy styling
Grading System social include posture, grip, movement and the parts of the anatomy they a ect. This kinetic model is complemented with kinesthetic concepts, such as body hardness and ow of vital energy (e.g. the qi in kung fu), that are not quanti able in themselves, but are manifested and perceptible through kinetic means. Stylistic dimension. How combinations of kinesthetic features culminate in what may be de ned as a technique, choreography (or form, e.g. kata or taolu), style or as an entire martial art, is the remit of this module. Along with the kinesthesia of styles, the symbolism that inspires them or aids their transmission (e.g. the observation of a drunkard's erratic moves or of a crane's stance) is of unquestionably crucial cultural value and is encoded as a Symbolic Object. Social dimension. This is the system that describes how martial disciplines are taught, learnt, assessed and disseminated. Here, a Martial Arts Community represents collective social agents where this takes place, e.g. a school, clan, sect or sports federation. These are also distinguished through their training methods, and the norms in place to assess the technical mastery of a practitioner. The relevance of capturing this aspect as a potential cultural trait is warranted by the fact that, even within the same discipline and style, di erent pedagogical frameworks may be employed by assimilation or opposition.
Note that no speci c commitment is made to the HKMALA context: any
notions speci c to Southern Chinese martial arts will require the ontologies to
be specialised or instantiated (req. #2). Also, to ensure enough exibility to
develop rule systems upon the ontologies, we aim at an implementation within
the OWL 2 RL pro le (req. #3). Such rule system will be necessary to be able
to classify e.g. an experienced practitioner as a Master { a status recognised in
the social dimension { or a piece of Armament or other object as a training tool.
Lastly, we are experimenting with the adoption of DOLCE UltraLite [
Our martial arts ontologies are being developed to serve a variety of use cases.
The main ongoing e ort is the knowledge-based re-organisation of the HKMALA itself. To that end, an RDF dataset based on the ontology discussed earlier is being generated through re-engineering the structured metadata of HKMALA media les. Once augmented with alignments to datasets like Wikidata, the dataset will be used for the annotation of individual segments of motion capture and video resources, thus enabling ne-grained querying of the entire archive through the resulting knowledge graph. Both tasks are currently underway.
Another goal is to formalise the detection of cultural contact: the
documentation that accompanies HKMALA exhibitions references many contexts where a
form of in uence took place, e.g. Japan to China or military to civilian, and the
traits where it is manifested, such as weaponry or the symbolism behind a
technique or style. Granados-Garc a previously conducted a similar study, if on the
Ancient World and over tangible cultural heritage, developing a CIDOC-based
cultural contact model6 and inference rules written as OWL property chains and
SPARQL constructs [