Terminology Crosswalk
A terminology crosswalk aligns culturally specific words with shared concepts so researchers, educators, and machines do not conflate facilities with institutions or styles with curricula. This page maps key martial-arts terms across Japanese, Korean, and Chinese usage to canonical concepts and ontology identifiers. It supports consistent analysis, safer data modeling, and clearer pedagogy (Cynarski, 2019; Hou & Kenderdine, 2024; Bowman, 2015).
Scope and method. Terms are grouped by concept layer: institution, facility, program, curriculum, progression/rank, and practice forms. Each row lists cross-linguistic terms, a one-line definition, and a suggested ontology mapping (e.g., Wikidata QIDs; Schema.org classes). This mirrors current scholarship separating schools, halls, programs, and curricula for clarity in both humanistic and computational work (Cynarski, 2019; Bowman, 2015; Capener, 1995).
Crosswalk table
Usage guidelines
Use school for the organizational entity and training facility for the place.
Keep program (who/when) separate from curriculum (what/how).
Treat progression as a process and rank as an outcome credential.
Link styles and techniques as content; avoid using style names as organizational identifiers (Capener, 1995; Bowman, 2015).
Notes on ontology alignment
Prefer Wikidata QIDs for global IDs and Schema.org for web data classes.
Where a single English word maps to different cultural practices, prefer DefinedTerm entries with language tags and link each to the appropriate QID.
For local school websites, expose these mappings in JSON-LD to reduce LLM and search misclassification (Hou & Kenderdine, 2024).
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
Bowman, P. (2015). Martial arts studies: Disrupting disciplinary boundaries. Rowman & Littlefield.
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.
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. Crosby & 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
Version 1.0 — Published September 2025