=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2949/short2
|storemode=property
|title=Ontology-Mediated Cultural Contact Detection Through Motion and Style in Southern Chinese Martial Arts(extended abstract)
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2949/short2.pdf
|volume=Vol-2949
|authors=Alessandro Adamou,Yumeng Hou,Davide Picca,Mattia Egloff,Sarah Kenderdine
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/swodch/AdamouHPEK21
}}
==Ontology-Mediated Cultural Contact Detection Through Motion and Style in Southern Chinese Martial Arts(extended abstract)==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2949/short2.pdf
Ontology-Mediated Cultural Contact Detection
Through Motion and Style in Southern Chinese
Martial Arts?
Alessandro Adamou1[0000−0002−9272−908X] , Yumeng Hou3[0000−0002−7908−0693] ,
Davide Picca2[0000−0003−2014−0855] , Mattia Egloff2[0000−0002−1740−519X] , and
Sarah Kenderdine3[0000−0002−7190−9946]
1
Bibliotheca Hertziana - Max Planck Institute for Art History, Italy
2
University of Lausanne, Switzerland
3
Laboratory for Experimental Museology, EPFL, Switzerland
Keywords: Intangible cultural heritage · Ontology · Martial arts.
1 Introduction
Intangible cultural heritage (ICH) is the discipline that encompasses methods
to encode for preservation, publish and transmit objects of cultural significance
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 efforts respond
to this challenge through several means, notably by capturing performances of
culturally significant 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
significance in studying their role in the transmission of culture. This has been
primarily carried out in the context of dance, arguably the best-known perfor-
mative 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).
Copyright © 2021 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
2 A. Adamou et al.
them with hand techniques due to the prohibition to bear arms - to counter the
phenomenon of piracy in China. Such influence 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 influence, assimilation or domination. The study
will contribute: (1) a flexible, 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 Background
2.1 The movement in martial arts as ICH
Unlike tangible monuments, where cultural identities are manifested through
physical objects, intangible heritage is defined 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 ex-
change. 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 [12].
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” [1] - incorporate
a global diffusion of ideas, images and consumer goods, as well as present the
transnational crossing of social-cultural boundaries [6]. For this reason, the gen-
eral domain of martial and combative arts has attracted numerous scholarly
enquiries to understand social and personal transformations, as well as to reveal
the circular impact of body and culture upon each other [3].
2.2 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 [11]. With these groups
as the hives of cultural transformation, Hong Kong has acted as a vibrant center
for Southern Chinese martial arts throughout the 20th century due to its role first
as a major port and trading center, then as a safe haven for refugees across China
[4]. However, these treasured cultural practices, made famous globally by the
movie industry, are being endangered by rapid urban development, population
growth, cultural transformation, and the aging of the masters.
In response, the Hong Kong Martial Arts Living Archive (HKMALA) origi-
nated as a heritage project in 2012, to archive Hong Kong’s rich and diverse kung
Ontology-Mediated Cultural Contact in Southern Chinese Martial Arts 3
fu styles with traditions [4]. The HKMALA project is a longitudinal research
collaboration between the International Guoshu Association, City University of
Hong Kong, and the Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+ ) at EPFL. It
encompasses a comprehensive analysis of digital strategy including motion cap-
ture, motion-over-time analytics, 3D reconstruction, high speed and panoramic
video, and a comprehensive photographic archive of all kung fu masters involved.
Its datasets represent the world’s largest motion archive for intangible cultural
heritage, spanning over 130 sets of empty-hand and weapon sequences, or taolu,
representing 19 styles and performed by 33 elite Hong Kong practitioners. The
archive is accompanied by extensive contextual documentation such as ritual
descriptions and multimodal entities comprising texts, audios, interviews, and
digital records of physical objects such as weapons and training tools.
The current logical organisation of resources in HKMALA reflects 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 flexibility 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 influence. 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 [11],
as well as the basis for future educational programs [8].
3 Ontologies for cultural studies on martial arts
Our first effort in the knowledge organisation of HKMALA is to construct a for-
mal ontology. This has the dual aim of: (1) using it for modelling HKMALA
metadata into a knowledge graph, and the latter for reorganising multime-
dia/modal content and enabling ontology-based access to it; (2) enabling cultural
studies by identifying the potential for entities in the ontology to constitute cul-
tural traits, so that a rule system for detecting contact can be built upon them.
Any modelling effort with a focus on cultural heritage must provide a scholar
with the tools to single out and highlight the entities with a potential to con-
tribute 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 sel-
dom captured as cultural objects, and any encoding effort comes at a loss. Whilst
in our use case kinetic and kinesthetic elements hold our primary interest, it can-
not be denied that dimensions pertaining to, e.g. how the discipline is taught or
the symbology of preset choreographies, are equally culturally significant.
Based on these design considerations, the ontology network is being devel-
oped 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).
4 A. Adamou et al.
1. Modular. As the dimensions along which cultural contact is traced vary pro-
foundly, 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 di-
mensions through which lenses can be built to highlight a cultural phenomenon
(req. #1). These are the kinesthetic, stylistic, and social dimensions.
represented by
Symbolic
Object Styling
Armament represented by
on employs
System
taught at
handlled has intent
Intentive MA
Grip with Technique Approach Community
requires
part of Syllabus
Bodily absorbs practiced in
Hardness with stance part of valid for
Grading
adopts
uses Scale
belongs in
Handling Vital
Training
Flow Method Grading
Posture Choreo- practiced in
System
graphy
kinesthesia
styling social
Fig. 1. Key concepts of our martial arts ontology network, structured according to
three principal cultural dimensions: kinesthesia, styling and social.
The starting documentation for this modelling effort 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 figure reflects 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.
Ontology-Mediated Cultural Contact in Southern Chinese Martial Arts 5
include posture, grip, movement and the parts of the anatomy they affect. This
kinetic model is complemented with kinesthetic concepts, such as body hardness
and flow of vital energy (e.g. the qi in kung fu), that are not quantifiable in
themselves, but are manifested and perceptible through kinetic means.
Stylistic dimension. How combinations of kinesthetic features culminate in
what may be defined 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, different pedagogical
frameworks may be employed by assimilation or opposition.
Note that no specific commitment is made to the HKMALA context: any
notions specific to Southern Chinese martial arts will require the ontologies to
be specialised or instantiated (req. #2). Also, to ensure enough flexibility to
develop rule systems upon the ontologies, we aim at an implementation within
the OWL 2 RL profile (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 [7] as the
top-level ontology that provides fundamental notions such as agents, qualities,
norms and methods, as its highest level closely reflects our expectation for a core
set of candidate entities for cultural traits (req. #4). The decision to extend a
top-level ontology, rather than a cultural heritage model such as CIDOC CRM
[5], is motivated by the fact that this is primarily a domain ontology, therefore
its cultural heritage standing is to be indirectly detected (see below).
4 Outlook
Our martial arts ontologies are being developed to serve a variety of use cases.
The main ongoing effort is the knowledge-based re-organisation of the HK-
MALA itself. To that end, an RDF dataset based on the ontology discussed
earlier is being generated through re-engineering the structured metadata of HK-
MALA media files. Once augmented with alignments to datasets like Wikidata,
the dataset will be used for the annotation of individual segments of motion cap-
ture and video resources, thus enabling fine-grained querying of the entire archive
through the resulting knowledge graph. Both tasks are currently underway.
6 A. Adamou et al.
Another goal is to formalise the detection of cultural contact: the documenta-
tion that accompanies HKMALA exhibitions references many contexts where a
form of influence 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 tech-
nique or style. Granados-Garcı́a 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 [10]. We are investigating the application of this approach
to semi-automatically detect cultural influence on the HKMALA dataset, by
creating new inference rules that use ICH elements as cultural traits.
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