BalOnSe: Temporal Aspects of Dance Movement and Its Ontological Representation

In this paper, we propose an approach to describe the temporal aspects of ontological representation of dance movement. By nature, human movement consists of complex combinations of spatiotemporal events, a fact that creates a big challenge for representing, searching, and reasoning about movement-related content, such as movement annotations on video dances. We have defined MoveOnto, a movement ontology whose expressive power captures movements that range from body states and transitions based on the semantics of Labanotation, to generic actions or specialized vocabularies of specific dance genres, e.g., ballet or folk. We combine the ontology description with temporal reasoning in Datalog-MTL, based on temporal rules of the movement events. Finally, we present the specifications and requirements for dance exploration from a user’s perspective and describe the architecture of BalOnSe, a specific system that is currently under implementation on top of MoveOnto according to them. BalOnSe consists of a web-based application with semantic annotation, search, and browsing on the movements, as well as a backend with archival and query processing functionality based on temporal rules.