Upper Martial Arts Ontology

The Upper Martial Arts Ontology (UMAO)

What is it?

A bit of a passion project began in the summer of 2021 as a means of getting familiar with the Protege ontology editing tool. It aligns with the Schema.org ontology.

What is the scope of the graph?

It's intentionally high-level; I make no mention of any specific martial arts, only the elements common to all of these physical arts.

What is the intent of the graph?

For me, to learn Protege. Eventually for all, to enable the description of any and all specific martial arts in implemented knowledge graphs. Right now it's just a comprehensive schema (as comprehensive as I can get it to be).

Where is the knowledge derived from?

I am not a mystic, therefore knowledge must be derived from thought. This ontology is derived from my own conceptualization of martial arts, in addition to my reading "The Tao of Jeet Kune Do" by the great Bruce Lee.

Is it done?

No, not really. I will never be satisfied with it. It may serve well as a basis for someone else who is more knowledgeable, but I will probably be editing it for a long time intermittently.

What's next?

At this point I realize I am talking to no one but myself. Let this readme serve as documentation for my work. I intend to do several things:

• Implement a github.io page and a browseable ontology thing with CSS (like this)
• Eventually, see if you can implement a specific martial art (like Jeet Kun Do, Judo or Sumo) using the constructs in UMAO; this will provide good validation/identify holes
• Maybe use DL-Learner to find other holes?
• Hash out the rest of the relationships, of which there are many to check and add

Can I contribute?

Yes, yes and yes. Make an issue and comment on things you think are missing or wrong. There's an old saying in the semantic web community, I think from a seminal paper on the matter of ontologies, that states "a conceptualization isn't useful unless it is shared." So, please, suggest away. I'm not keen on someone updating the turtle file itself, though, because I have never done version control for RDF... I guess this could be ok if a dedicated contributer or two came about. As it stands, I'm alone in this endeavour.

Can I use it?

Yes; just link back to this Github for reference to future versions.