A Labanotation based ontology for representing Vietnamese folk dances44989

A Labanotation based ontology for representing Vietnamese folk dances Ma Thi Chau Human Machine Interaction Laboratory University of Engineering and Technology, Hanoi, Vietnam chaumt@v

A Labanotation based ontology for representing

Vietnamese folk dances

Ma Thi Chau

Human Machine Interaction Laboratory

University of Engineering and Technology, Hanoi, Vietnam

chaumt@vnu.edu.vn

Nguyen Thanh Thuy

Computer Science Department University of Engineering and Technology, Hanoi, Vietnam

Bui The Duy Human Machine Interaction Laboratory University of Engineering and Technology, Hanoi, Vietnam

Abstract— This paper aims at designing and constructing an

ontology, representing and allowing Vietnamese folk dances

annotation An effective approach proposed is based on movement

analysis It is possible to divide Vietnamese folk dances into basic

units, then movement phrases, movement primitives and dance

poses Studying deeply Vietnamese folk dances features and

characteristics allows to find out 5 different types of relationships

between main dance components Typical relationships could be

written in the form of logical predicates For enriching ontologies,

a formal encoding of the ontology expertise knowledge in the

domain is performed by DL-Lite The paper uses OWL-2 for

building, organizing and visualizing ontologies A case study – Mo

folk dance with a knowledge base, is structured simply but

effectively, with reasoning in DL-Lite and answering queries in

SPARQL

Keywords— semantic web, ontology, description logics lite

DL-lite, Labanotation, Vietnamese folk dance, Mua mo (Mo dance)

I INTRODUCTION

Vietnam is known as a country having a very diverse,

original and rich folk culture heritage, including folk songs,

folk games, water puppetry and folk dances whose promoting

and preserving are an urgent request Among Vietnamese folk

art forms, folk dances are really valuable art sources

Observing and studying folk dances, we can identify the

attitude, awareness, and religion, aesthetic and daily labor of

different ethnic communities In order to promote and preserve

folk dances, we propagate not only the dance performance, but

we have to understand also deeply the dance content and

context and its related domain knowledge

Ontologies – a formalism of describing entities with their

properties and relationships, suggest a new approach to

managing and sharing information using semantic metadata,

hence allow preserving and promoting Intangible Cultural

Heritage (ICH) in Vietnam Building ontologies for

Vietnamese folk dances is thus one of the most important and

specific issues that can be dealt with immediately to meet

practical demands in Vietnam, because ontologies provide an

effective method to understand deeply dances and their related

issues [1]

Our objective is to build up an initial ontology for Vietnamese folk dances, covering main concepts and properties

of folk dance movements This ontology, organizing messages and regional feature of dances, structuring movements and expressing relationships of related dance objects, will help storing, retrieving, classifying and analyzing folk dances, as well as training the folk-dance performance for the young generation It also can be used to model folk dances with advanced 3D-animation technology, hence to contribute to preserving and promoting the folk-dance heritage With the above objectives, we aim to use the dance ontology to develop multimedia solutions promoting the folk dance and its domain

in museums, to develop tools supporting dance training in Hanoi Academy of Theatre and Cinema, and to build a 3D dance viewer to show folk dances in theater

In this paper, we present principal steps in building a Vietnamese folk dance ontology We determine main concepts along with properties, build up the concept map based on expert knowledge in the concerned domain Regional features and messages in Vietnamese folk dances are discussed Logical assertions, embedded in that ontology, will allow inferred results, enhancing the efficiency of searching dances Briefly,

we have three main contributions: (i) to make taxonomy of movements in the folk dances based on analyzing Labanotation movements; (ii) to analyze relationship between dance movements and their historical, cultural message; and (iii) to build a dance ontology describing dance movements and their messages The paper is organized as follows Section II presents some related works Section III focuses on the analysis and ontology development on Vietnamese folk dance, whereas Section IV illustrates, in detail, process of building and formalizing the dance ontology and some typical folk dances in Vietnam with an embedded logical representation Experiment result is discussed in section V

II RELATED WORKS

Preserving and promoting of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) have attracted lots of attention and are in urgent need Renzo et al [6] analyzed the usefulness of a

semantic network, the benefits of wikis, and the expressive

power of ontologies They are effective methods allowing the

community to participate in building, storing, and sharing

knowledge in order to preserve ICH In [10], authors showed

and analyzed the impact of the choreographic language agent

and the digital dance archive method on dance ontology

building There are many different ways of media usage by

choreographers, as a result, ontology builders have to face

with enormous sources and their inconsistence We could not

create different ontologies for distinct types of things because

this would cause the dispute of the existence dances Instead,

we should build a unified system about dance which reveals

about the ontology of the form and existing concepts of

movement, notation and embodiment Recently, many

significant ontologies for representing folk song and dance

have been developed In [8], ontology was built in OWL-2 to

represent and archive dance choreographies of seven Greek

folk dances Dances were described and stored taking

advantage of the Description Logics expressivity and the

semantics of the Labanotation SPARQL queries were used to

search within the ontology based on the steps and movements

of dances In [7], Basque folk song ontologies was reported

The authors also described a representation for folk song

metadata based on Ontology Web Language (OWL) He

showed in the paper how complex queries could be expressed

in OWL and solved using a description logic reasoner An

Ontology for video human movement representation based on

Benesh movement notation (BMN) [9] was proposed For

ontology building, an approach for semantic annotation of

movement and semantic concept classifiers in the videos was

used by combination of OWL and the semantics of the Benesh

Notation Then, the ontology concept was used to annotate

with BMN the video human movements In addition, the

proposed system allowed searching within the video

movement ontology via SPARQL queries

III VIETNAMESE FOLK DANCE ONTOLOGY DEVELOPMENT

A Proposed approach

An initial ontology for Vietnamese folk dances is built up as

proposed in Fig 1 For dance annotation, the Labanotation [2]

seems useful in analysis Labanotation is composed of two

main parts: movement analysis and movement symbolic

representation Movement analysis records the general idea

behind movements and allows an improvement of basic

movements The part also descripts specifically and precisely

movement elements including body parts, time, direction and

dynamics

We apply movement analysis of Labanotation in the

folk-dance analysis We also study Vietnamese folk folk-dance domain

in order to perceive their messages Based on a hierarchy

structure of dance movements and expertise knowledge of the

folk-dance domain, OWL will be used to describe classes and

properties Next, dance and its domain descriptions are

represented formally in Description Logic, in which the

reasoner supports answering different queries on Vietnamese

folk dance

Fig 1.
Proposal for building Vietnamese folk dance ontology

B Gathering and analyzing expert knowledge

Analyzing regional features and messages in the Vietnamese folk dance

In Vietnam, 54 ethnic groups have their own folk dances, which express cultural knowledge, spiritual life, reflecting Vietnamese people’s creativity and talent Ethnic groups, geographically closing together, have similar customs Therefore, folk dances of Vietnam’s 54 ethnic groups can be classified regionally into 7 main groups: Highland-Midland Northern, Red River Delta, North Central, Coastal South Central, Highlands, South East and South West regions [4, 5]

In addition, Vietnamese folk dances express 3 groups of messages [5]: (i) daily life activities, (ii) festival activities and, (iii) human spirituality Through dances, people want to pass

on an experience of productive labor, hunting and show the behavior of human beings, such as sailing dance (mua cheo thuyen), weaving dance (mua det cui) Festivals of any village, reflected alive popularly in dances, are always composed of two parts: the ceremonial part, to give homage to the local genies and deities, and the festival one to entertain the whole village Drum dance (mua trong), Thai spreading dance (mua xoe Thai), for example, are performed in local festivals Chau dance (mua Chau), Hau Dong dance (mua Hau Dong) are typical examples of spiritual dances, which express praying for auspices and blessing by the gods, heaven, Buddha We identify regional features and messages transmitted in a dance, based on many aspects such as dance posture and movement, clothing, dance props, music In the first phase, we concentrate only on representing and analyzing movement aspects of folk dances

Analyzing movements in Vietnamese folk dances

Fig 2.
Laban symbol hierachy

For a dance, Labanotation analyzes some aspects as

travelling and travelling time of dancers, the relationship

between dancers, between dancers and stage, and dancers

themselves [2] (Fig 2) Labanotation system analyzes the body

of dancer as symmetry objects and divide the body in to

different parts based on joints of bones Laban symbol system

is used to represent movements of body parts, movement

trajectory of dancer and positon of dancer in the stage by the

time We take advantage of analyzing movement techniques

into analyzing Vietnamese folk dance A Vietnamese folk

dance includes basic units [3] Each basic unit is defined as the

smallest movement with a complete meaning There are two

main types of movements, corresponding to basic actions:

actions of the whole body and actions of some body parts as in

Labanotation [2] (i) Body movements, making the position of

the whole body of dancer changed in space and (ii) Body part

movements, making the position of different parts of dancer’s

body changed For body movements, dancers move on stage

On the other hand, dancers change their position on a plane

The Vietnam traditional folk dance is different from modern

dances in body movement There are no body movements,

which lift dancers on the air So, body movements in the

Vietnamese folk dance are not too complicate We define

movement phrases as follows Each movement phrase is a

simple body movement, which has a trajectory in the form of a

line: an acre, a dot on a plane as a straight pathway, a curved

pathway and stillness as in the Labanotation [2] Body

movements are composed of movement phrases As said

above, movement phrases include moving spot (a dot),

translation (a line), and rotation (an arc) A translation can be

done in one of eight orientations There are two types of

rotation: clockwise and counter clockwise Moving spot phrase

can be also in the turn (with different degrees) or no-turn

Along with the implementation of the body phrases, dancers

perform body part movements, called as movement primitives

Movement primitives are quick movements which change the

position of body parts On the other hand, a movement

primitive is a movement between two main dance poses A

dance pose is a particular position of dancer’ body There are

basic head poses, basic hand poses, basic arm poses, basic leg

poses and basic combined arm-leg poses (fig 3 a) So,

movement primitives include hand movements, upper/lower arm movements, feet movements, upper/lower leg movements,

head movements, and arm-leg movements We use dance orientations, angles between arms/legs with the torso and

angles between limbs inside arms/legs to describe basic body part poses In Vietnam folk dances, there are eight orientations, denoted by Orient1, Orient2, Orient3, Orient4, Orient5 Orient6, Orient7, Orient8 corresponding to forward, right front diagonal, right side, right back diagonal, backward, left back diagonal, left side and left front diagonal respectively

As mentioned above, there are two types of movements related

to body and body parts Hence, it is necessary to discriminate orientation of body or body parts For the first type, the dancer, for example, moves straight in orientation Orient1 means he moves straight forward Or, he performs Phrase Movement Trans_O1 The second type of orientation (also included 8 values) is associated with body parts (considered as a local coordinate) In this type, Orient1 coincides with the forward of the dancer LegPose1, for instance, is described as follows: both legs are straight, left foot is in Orient8 and right foot is in Orient2 (fig 3 b, top) LegPose4 has right knee bent, left foot is

in Orient8 and right foot is in Orient1 with the right toes are at the left heel (fig 3 b, bottom) The orientations in LegPose1 and LegPose4 is the second type

Fig 3.
a, dance poses b, legposes

C Concepts and properties

We start building a Vietnamese folk dance ontology by defining dance components based on movement analysis and dance domain knowledge As mentioned above, we segment a dance into basic units Most visual and meaningful dance features will be used to associate a description to basic units A basic unit consists of one or several movement phrases Each movement phrase contains several movement primitives A primitive has at least 2 basic poses with a duration, changing from the first pose to the last one

In order to provide rich movement descriptions, we organize a taxonomy of dance movement classes as represented

in Fig 4 Some of the more prominent classes of the ontology are the following:

• Movement: This class can be considered as the “root”

of the movement aspect (related to body and body

part) of dance It encodes the information about

phrase movements, primitives and poses

• Dancer: this class represents dancers in a dance

• Group, Groupshape, LineRelation, CircleRelation:

these classes encode information of dancer groups in

dance

• CKeyTime: this class encodes the connection between

all different objects related to a step in a dance or

relations between pairs of all objects at a time

• Region and Message: these classes represent regional

and content information of dance

Based on the movement dance analysis in III.B, we

completely determine objects in dance Group(A),

Groupshape(“Circle”), and CircleRelation(“FaceToTheCenter”),

for instance, represent A is a group of dancers, the dancers

make a circle and they face to center of the circle respectively

There are some types of relationships among classes

presented in the form of predicates First ones relate to

performing different poses and movements Second ones are

about the spatial relationship with the stage for dancers and

dancer groups Third ones concern dancer groups Fourth ones

deal with the relationship between the content of a folk dance

and its region Table I shows typical predicates and their

explanation

TABLE I
S OME PREDICATES

1 BelongToRegion(a,b) Dance a/BasicUnit a belong to

Region b

2 MemberOf(a,b) Dancer a is member of Group b

3 HasMessage(a,b) Dance a /BasicUnit a has Message b

4 HasPosition(a,b) Dancer a/Group a has Position b

Fig 4.
Some ance movement classes and their instances

Beside properties and values of dance movement classes,

we add a meaning of the basic unit with detailed descriptions to make metadata (Table II)

TABLE II
SOME BASIC UNITS

N

o Basic units Description Messages

Region

s

1

MO Inviting A

Start with legpose1, arms

away 3 cm in front of torso, bicep and forearm are orthogonal,

Repeat: right/left legs straight

ahead with heel touching the ground, right/left arms also straight ahead along the orientation of the leg with opened hand Body can rotate any orient, backward or forward

Invitation Red

River delta

2

MO toe touching

Start with leg pose1 Repeat: right/left legs

straight, left/right knees bend with toe touch the ground, arms clap up in orient 8/2, head lean in orient 8/2

Joy Red

River

delta

3

MO Foot Dragging

Repeat:

(1) move right leg 40cm in orient2,

(2) drag left leg next to right leg, with left feet in orient8 (3) clap hand in front of right shoulder

Joy; scope change

Red River

delta

4

MO rotation jumping

Repeat:

(1) lift right knee where right calf orthogonal to body, arms clap under the calf;

(2) lift left knee where left calf orthogonal to body, arms clap under the calf;

(3) lift right knee where right calf orthogonal to body, arms clap above the head;

(4) lift left knee where left calf orthogonal to body, arms clap behind the back;

Jump and rotation combinati

on

Red River delta

IV FORMALIZATION OF MO DANCE IN DL-LITE

In this section, we present a logical representation in DL-Lite [1] of Vietnamese folk dances We shall investigate in details a specific folk dance, called “MO dance under the moon” which is very well known in the Red River Delta region

of Vietnam

A Vietnamese folk dance representation

The classes (Dance, BasicUnit, Region, Message, etc, as

mentioned in section 3) are now converted into corresponding

atomic concepts Inclusion assertions of the form B⊆C,

expressing constraints, relationships between concepts (in

section 3.3), are encoded in TBox For example, the assertion,

∃BelongToRegion⊆ Dance, indicates that if there exists an

individual belonging to a certain region, this individual is a

dance or a basic unit in a dance When we recognize a dance

or a basic unit, we will know also its regional feature ABox

contains a set of assertions of folk Vietnamese folk dance

domain

Tbox

∃BelongToRegion⊆ Dance

∃BelongToRegion - ⊆ Region

∃HasMessage⊆ BasicUnit

∃HasMessage - ⊆ Message

∃MemberOf⊆Dancer

∃MemberOf-⊆Group

Abox

PhraseMovement("Trans_O2")

OrientOfTurn("CCW")

BasicUnit(“MoInviting”)

CircleRelation(“FaceToTheCenter”)

belongToRegion(“MoDanceUnderTheMoon”,”Red

river delta”)

B Time problem solving in representation of dance

A dance which is a series of movements over time includes

different steps So, class Step is necessary in the ontology A

movement in each step is a relationship of at least three related

objects, while predicates in DL-Lite is binary one For

instance, dancer A1 performs basic unit “MoInviting” and

group of dancer B simultaneously performs phrase movement

Trans_O1 in side by side relation at step S To solve the

problem, we add class CKeyTime to express the key

connecting one of the related objects On the other hand, the

fifth group of relationships is the one in which one of classes

is CKeyTime Hens, each predicate between two objects is

divided into two predicates which are the relationships

between the key and one of two objects

Step(S)

Dancer(A1)

Group(B)

CKeyTime(T1) %for dancer A1’s movement

CKeyTime(T2) %for group B’smovement

dancerCKT(T1,A1)

groupCKT(T2,B)

performsBasicunitCKT(T1,”MoIniviting”)

isInShapeCKT(T2,”Line”)

isInLineRelationCKT(T2,SideBySide”)

performsPhraseMovementCKT(T2,”Trans_O”)

belongToStep(T1,S)

belongToStep(T2,S)

C Mo dance under the moon

After having solution for time problem, specific dances are added to enrich the ontology MO is a very popular folk musical instrument, used usually by a very special messenger

in old villages, when go through the village for announcing an important notice to villagers Mo dances, combinations of Mo Dance Basic units, are actually existing only in the Red River Delta These dances are usually performed in village’s festivals The following gives the logical representation of “Mo Dance Under the Moon” – a specific MO dance in DL-Lite The dance having 20 steps is performed by 4 groups of dancers Firstly, there is some description of whole dance

Group(A) Group(B) Group(C) Group(D) memberOf(Ai,A) %i=1-3 memberOf(Bi,B) %i=1-3 memberOf(Ci,C) %i=1-3 memberOf(Di,D) %i=1-3 Dance(“MoDanceUnderTheMoon”) hasStep(Sti) %i=1-19

nextStep(Sti+1,Sti) i=1-18 Then, each step is descripted in detail combinesGroup(D2,D3) %make group D2 step(st1)

CKeyTime(t11) CKeyTime(t12) CKeyTime(t13) CKeyTime(t14) CKeyTime(t15) hasPositionCKT(t11,”rightfront”) GroupCKT(t11,A)

isInOrientationKDT(t11,Orient6) isInShapeCKT(t11,”line”) isInRelationCKT(t11,”behind each other”) belongToStep(t11,st1)

… Step 1 has identity st1 In this step, two dancer D2 and D3 make a group t11, t12, t13, t14, t15 are keys At the key time t11, all dancers in group A make a line in direction Orient6 and in relation behind to each other

V EX PERIMENTS AND DISCUSSIONS

Related materials of the folk dance are supported by Hanoi Academy of Theatre and Cinema The materials include videos, dance curriculum [3] cultural book [4], master thesis [5] With the materials, we build the initial experimental ontology including 37 classes, 198 individuals, and 35 properties, being built in Protege 5.0 alpha with hundreds of instances and axioms These classes, individuals, and properties descript hierarchy of movement, relationship among pair of dancers, dancer groups, time, messages, features, stages

in the folk dance and two case studies of specific folk dances The two folk dances – “Mo dance in the moon” and “Sap dance” - are typical The version of Protege supports OWL-2 with SPARQL, OWLViz and many other useful plugins We analyzed Basic Units and some typical Vietnamese folk dances

in different regions

This ontology of Vietnamese folk dances is useful and

could be used in different contexts Firstly, it supplies a kind of

complementary knowledge to spectators who are enjoying a

dance performance In order to understand dance contents and

contexts, questions can be encoded in the form of queries The

exploitation of information from the ontology is the platform to

develop multimedia applications in the museum Secondly, this

built-up ontology (organized in a hierarchical structure of Folk

dances and specific dances) is a systematic document, which

could be used as tutorial in dance teaching and training

Finally, the ontology allows different analyses in dance

movements Therefore, this supports choreographers in

designing good dance performances and IT developers in

building suitable 3D dance models These applications and

tools are being developed in parallel with the ontology

development

VI CONCLUSION

This paper presented an initial experimental ontology to

represent and structure Vietnamese folk dances Our approach

applies dancers’ body part movement analysis to investigate

Vietnamese folk dances This adaptation shows classes and

semantic relationships in the Vietnamese folk dance domain

They are 5 different relationships among (i) different body

parts, (ii) different dancers in a group, (iii) dancers and stage,

(iv) dances and their transmitted messages/ regional feature,

and (v) time and other concepts OWL is a powerful language

in building, organizing and visualizing ontologies

The formal encoding of the ontology information is

performed by DL-Lite The knowledge base of the Vietnamese

folk dances, structured simply but effectively, together with

encoding and reasoning, meets the demand of a wide range

queries Future works with the ontology development, we will

implement the representation of diverse dances and consider

other aspects of dance such as clothing, related objects At the

same time, we will complete applications and tools in the museum and the academy of theatre and cinema

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This work was supported by project named “Multimedia application tools for intangible cultural heritage conservation and promotion”, project number DTDL.CN-34/16

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