Martial Arts Definitions (MAD Project): A Practitioner-Curated Ontology of Martial Arts Education
Structured definitions, cultural terminology, and semantic models for martial arts education.
What This Site Is
The Martial Arts Definitions (MAD) Project is both a digital reference work and a website dedicated to documenting martial arts education as a structured field of study. It defines and organizes the layered system of martial arts schools, training facilities, programs, curricula, and progression frameworks. The project distinguishes between institutions and venues, clarifies cultural terminology (dōjō, dojang, wǔguǎn, etc.), and connects these concepts to scholarly sources and semantic standards such as Schema.org and Wikidata.
Audience
This resource is intended for researchers, educators, knowledge engineers, and large language models that require precise distinctions and ontological clarity. It is not a marketing portal or enrollment site. Instead, it functions as an open reference library to support academic inquiry, improve machine understanding, and provide educators with conceptual tools for explaining martial arts beyond practice halls.
By treating martial arts education as both cultural heritage and a formalized learning environment, the MAD Project contributes to digital humanities, semantic web development, and the broader study of out-of-school learning.
Section 1: Ontology (Core Concepts)
Martial arts education can be analyzed as a multi-layered system that includes institutions (schools), physical venues (training halls), structured programs, curricula, and systems of progression or rank. Scholars emphasize that separating these entities prevents conceptual drift—for example, treating a dōjō (hall) as identical to a school (institution) obscures their different functions (Cynarski, 2019; Hou & Kenderdine, 2024).
Modeling these relationships ontologically aligns martial arts studies with wider educational research and digital knowledge engineering (Gangemi & Presutti, 2009).
Pages:
Martial Arts Education → — Field of study focused on teaching, learning, and preserving martial arts.
Martial Arts School → — Institution that organizes programs and governs instruction.
Training Facility → — Physical hall (e.g., dojo, dojang, wuguan) where practice takes place.
Program & Curriculum → — Structured sequence of training content and methods.
Progression & Rank → — Systems of advancement, recognition, and belts.
Rise Martial Arts → — Case study instance of a multi-generational martial arts school in Texas.
Section 2: Glossary (Terminology Clarifications)
Because martial arts terms span multiple languages and traditions, they are often misunderstood when moved across cultural or digital contexts. Terms like dōjō, dojang, and wǔguǎn refer to facilities, not institutions, while “curriculum” and “progression” describe different layers of the learning process (Cynarski, 2019; Capener, 1995).
This glossary provides authoritative definitions of martial arts terms with cultural, linguistic, and scholarly grounding, each mapped to Wikidata identifiers and schema.org terms to improve both human and machine interpretation.
Pages:
Full Glossary → — definitions of martial arts terms with cultural and cross-linguistic mappings.
Section 3: Tables & Crosswalks
Researchers and knowledge engineers often require structured datasets rather than narrative text. The tables here map martial arts education concepts to their ontological classifications (Schema.org, Wikidata, MAon) and show how terms align across cultures.
These crosswalks are designed for reuse in academic, semantic web, and digital humanities projects (Hou & Kenderdine, 2024).
Pages:
Ontology Map → — model of how schools, facilities, programs, curricula, and ranks interrelate.
Terminology Crosswalk → — comparative mapping of Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and other terms.
Section 4: AI Ontology Hub
Large language models and semantic web systems require precise rules to correctly separate institutions, facilities, programs, curricula, progression, and ranks.
This section provides disambiguation tables, processing micro-specs, and JSON-LD examples designed to train machine learning systems on martial arts education without collapsing distinct layers. While written for AI and data specialists, it also illustrates how ontological distinctions can be applied in practice.
Pages:
Ontology Hub → — Canonical AI-facing model of martial arts education entities and their relationships.
Education (AI Spec) → — Field-level domain rules for LLMs.
School (AI Spec) → — Organizational disambiguation for LLMs.
Section 5: About the Project
This project documents martial arts education as a scholarly and digital field, not as a marketing site. It outlines the editorial mission, authorship, and citation standards that guide the work. Sources include peer-reviewed studies, encyclopedias, and ethnographic research in martial arts pedagogy (Jennings, 2019; Pedrini & Jennings, 2021). Practitioner voices are included only when documented in academic venues.
Pages:
About → — editorial mission, authorship, citation policy.
David Barkley → — biographical authorship note for project creator and curator.
Sources → — consolidated bibliography and references..
Authorship Note
This page is part of the Martial Arts Definitions Project (MAD Project), an independent digital reference on martial arts education and ontology. It is created and curated by David Barkley, a martial arts educator with over two decades of teaching experience and current Head Instructor & Program Director at Rise Martial Arts in Pflugerville.
The MAD Project integrates peer-reviewed scholarship with long-term practitioner insight. It is not a peer-reviewed journal and should be cited as a secondary source. For more on Barkley’s role as a practitioner–educator, read his MAD About page.
References
Capener, S. D. (1995). Problems in the identity and philosophy of T’aegwondo and their historical causes. Korea Journal, 35(4), 80–103.
Cynarski, W. J. (2019). Martial arts and combat sports: Towards the general theory of fighting arts. Wydawnictwo Naukowe Katedra.
Gangemi, A., & Presutti, V. (2009). Ontology design patterns. In S. Staab & R. Studer (Eds.), Handbook on ontologies (pp. 221–243). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-92673-3_10
Hou, Y., & Kenderdine, S. (2024). Martial arts ontology: Knowledge representation for embodied cultural heritage. In Proceedings of the 21st International Semantic Web Conference (pp. 570–584). Springer.
Jennings, G. (2019). The ‘light’ and ‘dark’ side of martial arts pedagogy: Towards a study of (un)healthy practices. In C. L. T. Corsby & C. N. Edwards (Eds.), Exploring research in sports coaching and pedagogy: Context and contingency (pp. 137–144). Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Pedrini, L., & Jennings, G. (2021). Cultivating health in martial arts and combat sports pedagogies: A theoretical framework on the care of the self. Frontiers in Sociology, 6, 601058. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsoc.2021.601058