The Facets of Intangible Heritage in Southern Chinese Martial Arts: Applying a Knowledge-Driven Cultural Contact Detection Approach

Investigating the intangible nature of a cultural domain can take multiple forms, addressing for example the aesthetic, epistemic and social dimensions of its phenomenology. The context of Southern Chinese martial arts is of particular significance as it carries immaterial components of all these aspects: the technical and stylistic framework of a martial art system; the imagery associated to movements; and the transmission of knowledge orally, practically or through influence, are but examples of intangible characteristics that can and should be captured, not unlike cultural artifacts. The latter case– the one of formalizing cultural influence through its various forms of evidence– is emblematic as well as largely untrodden ground. A previous attempt at detecting cultural influence computationally was made in the context of Roman archaeology, though the binding of that early effort with the domain model was tight; also, there has hardly been any prior dedicated effort to model the martial arts domain through ontologies.

In this paper, we present the realization of the full cycle of a computational approach to investigating cultural contact in Southern Chinese martial arts. The entire approach is predicated upon the usage of standards and techniques of the Semantic Web and formal knowledge. Starting from a modular domain ontology, which models martial arts independently of the goal of capturing cultural influence, we perform knowledge extraction from archival material from the Hong Kong Martial Arts Living Archive and generate a dataset of the results modeled after said ontology. Then, we combine the resulting knowledge base with a rule model that represents ways to infer knowledge of potential contact between cultures based on the evidence present in the knowledge base. The results offer an insight into how an inference-based computational model can be applied to detect interesting facts even in the as-yet underexplored domain of intangible cultural heritage. The implemented workflow shows that the full-cycle employment of semantic technologies can offer the ground truth required for largely different approaches, such as statistical and machine learning ones, to operate.