A framework for expert system knowledge base in art psychotherapy

The field of art psychotherapy is a so called ill-structured paradigm that refers to a vague and unclear problem domain in which there are no clear objective means for finding a solution, and in certain cases the solutions found are inevitably contradictory. The expert system approach provides an appropriate means for finding solutions to such problems encountered in art psychotherapy. Implementation of an expert system to support diagnosis in the field of art psychotherapy requires extensive knowledge of the characteristics of the drawing, the psychological symptoms of the patient, the relationships between the characteristics of the drawing and the patient's symptoms, the diagnosis process, and the methods of knowledge acquisition. Collaboration among experts from many different fields is needed to provide such knowledge, including art psychotherapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, artists and knowledge engineers. The subjective, ambiguous, inconsistent and sometimes contradictory nature of the huge volume of knowledge involved makes the complex diagnosis process difficult for the field expert. In this chapter, we present an expert system knowledge base to support diagnoses in the field of art psychotherapy and its associated knowledge acquisition method. We provide details of an implementation strategy. In addition, we show how the knowledge base can be represented in terms of ontological framework, using the tool Protégé 2000. We also demonstrate the usefulness and suitability of the proposed approach by applying the system to a real clinical case.