Martial Arts as a markup language

This thesis describes the modeling of Martial Arts as a markup language. Up until now Martial Arts has already been documented in books, videos, tradition and other methods. Though to represent Martial Arts knowledge consistently and uniformly in a digital era, we introduce the Martial Arts Markup Language (MAML), which is based on XML. Because XML provides a standardized, serializable and portable format, MAML also enables sharing among students, teachers and their peers across different platforms, media and networks. MAML provides the ability, with appropriate XML tools, to document a Martial Arts style in a structured way. To achieve this, we first analyze the aspects that comprise Martial Arts; and how its states and processes relate to one another. We model in MAML describing the stances, transitions, punches, blocks, techniques, combinations, reactions and patterns used in Martial Arts. We discuss the implementation of MAML by observing and extracting the definable aspects in existing Martial Art Instructive Documents. The MAML Schema assures that the details of a Martial Arts Style’s elements are consistent. Current simulation efforts will be explained as well as areas for future development. We have described Martial Arts by observing what has already been done and creating a structured standard to document them. We hope to enable practitioners’ abilities to learn from and develop their arts by providing a resource in which they can interact with.