Preliminary Meta-Analyses of Experimental Design with Examples from HIV Vaccine Protection Studies

Knowledge engineering from experimental design (KEfED) is a novel approach based on the dependency relationships that occur between the variables of a scientific study. We used this approach to curate the experimental designs of ten scientific papers from a well-established database of HIV vaccine trials in non-human primates. The KEfED models provide a characteristic, data-oriented signature for each measurement made in the study. We present preliminary analysis of these manually-curated, detailed representations using our own open-source curation tools and show the multi-variate statistical analyses on the resultant models of experimental design. The analyses produced a visualization of the similarities between studies and an account of the dependency relationships across studies. We describe our approach in the context of a knowledge engineering strategy based on creating large-scale domain-independent repositories of experimental observatio